The Flossbank Attempt

3 years ago, Pete and I thought we could make an impact in the Open Source funding problem. We introduced a 3-click donation subscription model for companies that donated to every single Open Source dependency of that company, an in-terminal advertisement platform that only showed ads during installation of Open Source packages, and zero-friction international payouts to Open Source maintainers. It wasn’t enough.

We aren’t business development rockstars and we thought we could ride word-of-mouth to success. That wasn’t the case. The number of developers using our CLI ad platform hit a ceiling, and thus the ad platform was worthless (who will pay for ad space advertising to the same 400 people?). It was overwhelmingly difficult to onboard new companies to start contributing to their Open Source dependencies (“Sorry, we need a new credit card for this payment”, “Sorry, we don’t have budget for this year”, “Sorry, maybe when we raise more money”) even when the companies themselves wouldn’t exist without Open Source technology. Lastly, maintainers weren’t signing up as frequently as we hoped, even though we notified them (with gusto) that they had money waiting for them, no strings attached.

We don’t have the time it takes to give this a proper go, and need to close up shop before we burn through the rest of our limited funds on infrastructure costs.

We made zero dollars in this endeavor, we paid ourselves nothing, and we spent over 10k USD of our own money. Maintainers made over 20 thousand dollars throughout the past 3 years through our platform. With the help of Coil and Interledger, it became possible to pay maintainers all over the world in their currency of choice. We are forever indebted to them for their guidance and support.

And to all our fans — devs, maintainers, techies, etc. — thank you! Open Source funding will be solved one day, and maybe all of Flossbank’s open-sourced GitHub repositories could help in some way. But it won’t be solved by us. If you’d like to chat at any point about the project or our learnings, please don’t hesitate to reach out.

If you have the Flossbank CLI installed, don’t forget to uninstall it by running $ flossbank uninstall

-Joel and Pete @ Flossbank

Twitter: @joel_wasserman_