Yesterday, we announced a major milestone: there are now over 4,000 open source packages eligible for income via Tidelift.
What does this mean?
If you are the maintainer of one of these 4,000 packages, you can sign up to begin earning income by providing legal, security, and ongoing maintenance assurances for your projects (find a complete tour of what is involved in this post). In return, Tidelift will provide you with monthly recurring income, and your users will be able to build with more secure and reliable open source components.
Want to skip forward and check to see if your project is eligible for income? Claim your package here.
How much do these packages earn?
Right now, income levels range from $1,000 per year to over $30,000 per year, depending on the project. And these numbers are continuing to grow as more organizations purchase the Tidelift Subscription!
Who is eligible?
We currently have income available for packages in six different open source ecosystems: JavaScript, Ruby, Python, Java, PHP, and .NET. Any project committer is eligible to maintain a project on Tidelift, though if your project has co-maintainers, we’ll ask you to discuss it with everyone as part of your onboarding.
Who else is doing this?
Over 1,000 packages are already supported on Tidelift, from small JavaScript libraries, to large Python and Ruby projects like Celery and Nokogiri (see many other top projects here). We encourage you to also read interviews with earlier lifters from Material-UI, Pylint, and byebug to get a sense for why they decided to partner with Tidelift.
How do I start?
The best way to get started is to search to see if your package is eligible for recurring income. From there, go ahead and click the “lift your package” button to apply! If your package doesn’t have income yet, you can follow the same flow to find out how to start getting the word out to your existing users, and we’ll notify you when your project has income available.
> Learn more about getting paid to maintain your package with Tidelift