Going Full Time on Open Source
Source: Hacker News
For the last several years, I’ve been building and maintaining developer tools in my spare time, chiefly mise.
What started as a simple rewrite of asdf in Rust has become an incredibly successful local dev manager. mise now has 27k+ stars on GitHub and is the 10th most downloaded Homebrew formula. Roughly 1 % of users typing brew install are running brew install mise.
I’ve also watched mise show up in places I never expected, including OpenAI Codex Universal and NVIDIA OpenShell.
Alongside it I maintain:
- aube – the newest of the bunch
- hk – git hook runner
- pitchfork – process supervisor
- fnox – secrets manager
- usage
and a handful of smaller tools.
That has been incredibly rewarding, but it’s also become a lot of work. I could manage it alongside a full‑time job for a while, but as mise has grown that has become less realistic. I haven’t been able to keep up with PR reviews, and I’ve had to declare “notification bankruptcy” every few weeks by deleting all of my GitHub notifications.
I don’t want mise to stall because I only have scraps of time left after work. I want it to keep getting better, so I left Figma to work on these full time.
en.dev
To keep this sustainable I’m doing it under a company: en.dev. Right now that means one person — me — working full time on mise and the rest of the portfolio. If the funds grow enough, the plan is to bring on a second maintainer so mise keeps a bus factor above 1.
Money
My OSS work does not currently make enough money for me to live on. Right now, I make roughly:
- $100 /month from ads in the docs
- $500 /month from GitHub Sponsors
I’m grateful for this, but it won’t be enough, so I am trying a few different ways to make this work.
Memberships
For individuals who want to support the work, I’ve set up tiered memberships at en.dev:
| Tier | Price |
|---|---|
| Supporter | $5 /mo or $50 /yr |
| Member | $10 /mo or $100 /yr |
| Sustaining Member | $20 /mo or $200 /yr |
| Patron | $50 +/mo or $500 +/yr |
Members get access to a members‑only Discord, a mention in mise patrons, a bi‑weekly live Q&A, and a bi‑weekly newsletter.
For companies that rely on mise, I’m offering two sponsor tiers:
| Tier | Price | Benefits |
|---|---|---|
| Backer | $200 +/mo | Logo on en.dev, plus a GitHub Sponsors badge |
| Sustainer | $1,000 +/mo | Logo on en.dev and on the docs site for every en.dev tool (mise, hk, pitchfork, fnox, etc.) in a prominent position |
Sponsorship is not roadmap control and is not a private support contract; it simply funds the open‑source infrastructure companies depend on.
Consulting
I’ll spend up to two days a week consulting for companies that want hands‑on help adopting mise. Typical engagements include:
- Migrating a monorepo’s tooling onto
mise.toml - Wiring mise into CI and standardising images/containers
- Authoring custom plugins for internal tools
- Reviewing how secrets and env vars flow through developer machines
Rates are high — I’m the only person in the world who can offer this, slots are scarce, and a portion of every engagement subsidises ongoing mise development.
Paid Services
Longer term, I want to identify paid services I could host for teams that use mise. I haven’t figured out exactly what those should be yet, but the goal is sustainability, not building a SaaS empire. If you use mise at work and have ideas for services your team would pay for, please let me know.
The Goal
If you use mise and want to support it, you can:
- Become a member at en.dev
- Sponsor me on GitHub Sponsors
- Reach out if your company is interested in sponsorship or consulting
Thank you to everyone who has used mise, contributed, reported bugs, written docs, recommended it to teammates, or already sponsored the work.