Open-source funding in 2020

Back in January 2019, I created the Null company. My goal: help developers work better, through products, training and consulting. My secondary goal: make some of that work open-source.

Just like my financial report for 2019, here's my yearly update for 2020 on funding open-source work.

Open source funding

Of all the revenue earned by Null, here is the breakdown for 2020:

When I compare that with 2019, I am really happy to have grown the "open-source work" and "products" parts:

Development services

Most of the revenue is still related to development services, i.e. freelancing and consulting.

Serverless services

I have a specific category for serverless-related consulting and training.

This year I launched Bref Enterprise and it has been working out quite well.

Products

In 2020, I launched 2 products:

• Serverless Visually Explained, an online course for serverless
• 7777, a utility to connect easily to AWS RDS databases, built with Marco

I absolutely loved doing that, and I have more things planned for 2021 🚀

Open source work

Okay, here we are:

In 2020, my company earned around 13600€ directly related to open-source work.

Last year, it was 2000€. It is still a small share of the total revenue (and consequently, the money I take home every month), but it is definitely growing!

After accounting for expenses and taxes, it represents about 430€/month net income. That is not close to a real salary, but it is no longer negligible.

Last year was a bit premature to draw any conclusion. But looking back now, I can say that even with a widely used open-source project and an active online presence, living directly and only from open-source work (sponsoring) as an individual is extremely hard.

To be clear, I am more than happy with my situation. What I am getting at is more of a "warning" for others who aspire to live of open-source: don't expect to copy Evan You or Caleb Porzio easily.

2021 goals

I want to continue the current trend and accelerate it:

• continue working on open-source and grow the sponsoring (want to help? ❤️)
• continue delivering products and services that make developers awesome at their jobs!

See you next year!