Ask HN: What is the chance of getting a donation through support on GitHub?

I've been an open source developer for a long time now and enabled gh Sponsors around end of 2021. My most popular projects have around 1.3k and 450 stars. I claimed to donate all sponsored money to charity and in 2022/2023 when I was actively developing I earned around €260 in total and donated the full amount.

After my second child was born I did not have any time for developing any software. There were still some sponsors, but most of them canceled their sponsorships pretty quick (which was totally OK).

So I would say it depends on your projects, your luck and your consolistency how much you can earn, but i'm pretty sure your earnings will be nowhere near what you could earn by having a job or being a freelancer.

So if money is your primary motivation, I would pick freelancing/working for a company...

Thank you very much, after graduating from university I definitely started a company, but it would always be nice to get the money earlier.

You're welcome. I'm not sure money is the most important thing here, especially if you are not in financial trouble ATM.

My advice would be to focus on skills and experience. I would happily take a job with a great skilled team and less money working 8h day instead of earning 200k+ a year working 14h a day in a messed up environment - yet still: A good balance is important. A great team earning < 20k a year is also bad.

Keep in mind: In your early career phase nobody (not even good customers) will pay you a fortune without an exceptionally great idea, great planning and a good portion of luck. There is a lack of trust... you're unknown, hard to assess, etc.

Building a stable and growing career based on knowledge is much "healthier" (literally) - less up and downs, more stability, more planning (instead of having luck). Earning too much money too early can cause great damage to your life.

The amount of money you will get via donations will be either zero, or a rounding error from zero.

Donations is not a business model.

As you are a student, you may gain other benefits though. All programmers go through 3 stages;

1) you program to prove to yourself that you can. 2) you program to prove yo others that you can 3) you program because your output has value. (Ie you program for money.)

Indicentally there are lots of employed programmers who get stuck at level 2. They're forever doing work that adds no value, simply because they want to prove they can.

99% of Open Source has no value, but can be a valuable way to demonstrate your ability.