Software Architect / Microsoft MVP (AI) and Technical Author

GitHub, Open Source, Social Opinion API, Twitter, Twitter API v2

Can You Make Side Income with GitHub Sponsors?

You might have heard about GitHub sponsors a while back or maybe you haven’t. It’s a way for creators and developers to receive sponsorship for work they have published on GitHub.

I have an opensource .NET developer SDK that makes it simple and quicker for .NET developers to use version 2 of the new Twitter API.

I noticed on the NuGet download stats that it had received over 3,000 downloads and started to wonder what if I had commercialised it instead?

Someone on Twitter had suggested why not add a sponsorship option so here we are.

This is an experiment to see what the reality is when a sponsorship option is added to a repo + it might let me add more developer examples, documentations and unit tests!

Setting it Up

Setting up the sponsorship doesn’t take too long. The fiddliest part is setting up pay out options and filling in a tax form. You also need to setup a FUNDING.yml file (straightforward enough).

After you’ve setup the pay out option and .yml file, you can add a few sentences around why you’re asking for sponsorship and setup the tiers or sponsorship options.  I just went with the defaults. You can see these here.

When you’ve done all this, anyone that sees your profile on GitHub will see the see the option to sponsor you:

I have no idea how this will play out, but it will be interesting to see in the next 12 months.

JOIN MY EXCLUSIVE EMAIL LIST
Get the latest content and code from the blog posts!
I respect your privacy. No spam. Ever.

Leave a Reply