I pay $1 every hour I spend working on open-source
Tags: opensource
Published: 2018-12-06 13:07:12

---
title: I pay $1 every hour I spend working on open-source
published: true
description: Open source maintainer is undoubtedly the most underpaid job in our industry. I'll be surprised if the average hourly rate is more than $1. I personally pay $1 every hour I spend working on open-source.
tags: opensource
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cover_image: https://thepracticaldev.s3.amazonaws.com/i/8fuqccu4h5pu3392qza9.jpg
---

Open source saves a shit ton of money for modern companies. It's used on every level starting with software that powers infrastructure and ending with the libraries that developers use to build the company products. Yet, maintaining an open-source project is undoubtedly the most underpaid job in our industry. I will be shocked if the average hourly rate is more than a dollar.

It's certainly less for me. Actually, it's negative. I pay $1 for every hour I spend on [date-fns](https://date-fns.org/), a JavaScript library for working with dates that have 8M+ monthly downloads on npm. [Our estimated annual budget on Open Collective is $371](https://opencollective.com/date-fns). On average I work 20 hours per month and pay about $50/mo for the website hosting. I'm not even talking about my hourly rate and thousands of dollars I invested into the development so we can get on par with Moment.js functionality.

> The average household spends an average of $3,008 per year on dining out, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports

If [a family spends $3K on dining out](https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/27/how-much-americans-waste-on-dining-out.html) then [given the average tip size 20%](https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2017/06/22/tipping-etiquette-when-how-much/412098001/), an adult spends at least $300 on tips. Then why every developer doesn't spend $25 monthly on donations to open source teams or individuals? That should be minimal considering that the average developer salary is at least twice as big as the average income of an American household and we're using low-skilled labor as an example.

Furthermore, if you'd try to calculate how much money companies save using open source, I won't be surprised if the number would overcome the total company funding. However, most companies suck on giving back to open source. Why's that? I think the problem is in developers again.

Developers are notoriously bad at estimating practically everything, starting with hours they need for a feature and ending with the value they bring to the company. So no surprise they don't value the time of open source contributors as well. When an open source maintainer asks for money, they either ignore them or [label them as beggars](https://twitter.com/ITBeHa/status/1041955686240985089) or [salesman](https://twitter.com/MartinLClifford/status/1066758300241281024). [Some developers that employers should fund open source](https://github.com/moment/moment/issues/3979#issuecomment-304533266), but they look at the problem from the point of view of a Microsoft employee. And as a result, they get things such as [event-stream](https://github.com/dominictarr/event-stream/issues/116). How many dramas do we need to start waking up?

Developers are responsible for communicating the value they get from open source and convincing their managers to pay to open source they use. Managers won't realize it by themselves unless they use it as a marketing opportunity.

With [Open Collective](https://opencollective.com/), their [Back Your Stack](https://backyourstack.com/) and [Patreon](http://patreon.com) it's easy as never to support the open source, so what do you waiting for?

_Just go and donate to your favorite projects and maintainers and then bother your manager until they pay too. Let's make open source sustainable._