Going Full Time on Open Source

4-minute read

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. In fact, 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, which I’m really excited about), hk (git hook runner), pitchfork (process supervisor), fnox (secrets), usage, and a handful of smaller tools.

That has been incredibly rewarding. It’s also become a lot of work. For a while, I could do this alongside a full-time job. But as mise has grown, that has become less and less realistic. I have not been able to keep up with PR review the way I want to. I’ve had to declare notification bankruptcy every few weeks by deleting all of my GitHub notifications because I genuinely could not keep up.

I do not 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 going to try 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:

  • 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 and a mention in mise patrons. There will also be a bi-weekly Live Q&A and bi-weekly newsletter for members.

Sponsorships

For companies that rely on mise, I’m offering two sponsor tiers:

  • Backer — $200+/mo — logo on en.dev, plus a GitHub Sponsors badge. For small teams that depend on mise.
  • 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 more prominent position.

Sponsorship is not roadmap control, and it is not a private support contract. It is a way for companies to fund the open source infrastructure they depend on.

Consulting

I’m also going to spend up to 2 days a week consulting for companies that want hands-on help adopting mise. Typical engagements look like:

  • 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.

Longer term, I want to identify paid services I could host for teams that use mise.

I have not figured out exactly what those should be yet. I want these to be simple since my goal is sustainability so that I can build OSS tools, not building a SaaS and becoming a billionaire. 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 that, you can become a member at en.dev, sponsor me on GitHub Sponsors, or reach out if your company is interested in sponsorship or consulting.

Thank you to everyone who has used mise, contributed to it, reported bugs, written docs, recommended it to a teammate, or sponsored the work already.