FLOSS/fund for free and open source projects

I've maintained a fairly popular open source project for over 13 years[1]. The software is basically "complete." How does funding work for someone like me? I have no initiatives with it that require funding. Occasionally, I need to fix a bizarre obscure bug, or support a new python version/feature (async/await being the last big one). But otherwise, I just field questions a few times a month.

Truth be told, I'd rather be done with the project completely. It's like a little monkey on my back that I can never be rid of, that I must always tend to. But at the same time, since I can never realistically receive funding for it, the only value I get is the fact that my name is on it. I wish a big, legit company would just buy it off of me somehow, but there's no incentive for them either. I don't know how this ends.

1. https://github.com/amoffat/sh

I had the exact same experience with Nodemailer, a popular open-source project I started 14 years ago. My solution was to empty the README file and set up a dedicated documentation website. Since the project is popular, the documentation website receives around 70,000 visits per month. I initially tried paid ads, but they only netted about $200 per month—not great. So, I started a commercial project somewhat related to Nodemailer and added ads for my new project on Nodemailer’s documentation page. This brings in around 3,000 visits per month to my paid project through the ads on the documentation page. Even if the conversion rate is low, it’s essentially free traffic for my paid project, which is now approaching $10,000 MRR. Without the free visitor flow from my OSS project’s documentation page, I definitely wouldn’t have made it this far.

This is a really interesting approach, I hadn't thought of this!

Just out of curiosity, do you think the separate documentation page has better conversion than if you were to, say, include the ad directly into the readme inside the repo?