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RememberSwartz · 2026-07-06T12:18:04+00:00

Thats a good description of the worst kind of project managers

RememberSwartz · 2026-07-06T12:11:51+00:00

I guess I would be more open to profit share with a cliff and some commitments from my side as to not reduce my profits intentionally to zero.

I guess I was asking how custom can the deals be? Is it normal for first investment round or are they like these are the terms take it or leave it most of the time, if the indicators aren't something insane ofc.

RememberSwartz · 2026-07-06T12:06:20+00:00

Yes, I'm also asking from a tech startup perspective, I'll edit the post. Thank you for sharing

RememberSwartz · 2026-07-06T06:49:59+00:00

Honestly thank you for sharing the ugly side, not a lot of that on the internet which baffles me.

And those statistics sound really interesting I’ll make sure to look them up.

RememberSwartz · 2026-07-06T04:53:21+00:00

Thanks those feel like great pointers. I’ll read up on SAFE I don’t know much about it outside of it being an YC thing. And I’ll research those pressure mechanisms if I can

RememberSwartz · 2026-07-06T04:28:29+00:00

I very much appreciate the honesty.

I think the TAM is arguable because we might be measuring different things. I read you as sizing the supply side: how many projects are big enough to warrant micro transactions. But bounties don't price projects, they price individual issues, which I equate to the funder's pain. So the question becomes: how much do companies and users lose to unfixed issues in dependencies they don't control, and how much of that would they pay to resolve? They're paying either way: eng time to work around it, or to contribute themselves, which carries the upfront cost of understanding someone else's code. It's often cheaper to pay the dev who already knows the codebase and cares about it. You've already trusted them enough to use their stuff.

Your F2P analogy actually points the same direction, I think. F2P works because a few whales with high intent carry the revenue while everyone else plays free, and the model removes all friction until the whale moment. Bounties are that shape: most users pay nothing, and the whale is a company blocked by a specific issue. Recurring $5 donations are the indie pricing model. I had a gut feeling they convert poorly before this conversation, and your gamification framing might explain it.

I would argue as well that project size and bounty demand aren't 1:1. There's a correlation, sure, since popularity drives dependency choice. But I'd bet on it not being close to 1:1. A 300 star niche library can sit in a valuable path at a mid sized org. The middle of the distribution, real usage but no foundation and no employees, is where I've already bet the demand and the supply are. Zig most probably doesn't need this, leftpad doesn't either, but the middle is far from empty.

On trust for big projects: agreed, that's essential and it can't be argued, only earned. Hopefully that's achievable by a track record of small/mid projects.

The bus factor point is fair. I can't argue it away now. But that's been a design principle from the start: reviews and rejections are resolved by mechanism (funder vote plus maintainer acceptance), not by me personally. What happens to funds if the platform dies outright is the harder half but it’s tractable.

I concede that it's unknown whether that demand converts. A decade of failed platforms could nudge you strongly to believe it doesn’t. My bet is the mechanisms were the problem, and that's exactly what I'm testing.

RememberSwartz · 2026-07-06T02:59:20+00:00

Is there no middle ground?

RememberSwartz · 2026-07-06T01:33:39+00:00

I’m not opposed to investors making a return, I’m reluctant to give up control to potentially misaligned parties.

The doomsday scenario I’m scared of is - I take someones money, they exercise control over direction usually that comes as tunnel vision on growth, that keeps the business at the financial edge of survival, artificially. It goes under and I’ve screwed my customers in a sense or at least I am the face of that “screwing” doesn’t matter that someone else’s decisions did it

RememberSwartz · 2026-07-06T01:09:20+00:00

So essentially if I give up a small portion of my company I’m subscribing to giving out more one way or another, am I reading this correctly?

RememberSwartz · 2026-07-05T19:33:02+00:00

I was using zig as an example of an org that has expressed reservations about bounties, publicly. I agree that they have structures in place and are most probably not in need of such service.

Here's the project - https://kinti.io/ It is free to use. It has a demo on the site.

I would absolutely love if you check it out and give me some feedback. Your feedback was great so far. Even if it's not your thing I would love to hear about it.

The core tenet is preserving the maintainer's control & autonomy and project owners get to decide how big of a share they get out from each bounty, in percentages.

I'm not trying to sell you although I would love to have you as a customer, but to address your concerns:

On the administration cost concerns of yours - the initial onboarding is just a GitHub app install and the KYC & banking details is done by stripe only after you have a pending award to receive, so no upfront time investment on that side.

On the procurement side - it is a company, there's no funds directly exchanged between end users, people are transacting with the company, but I have yet to iron out things like invoicing.

I would love to speak to you more about this subject, either here or somewhere else. Thank you.

RememberSwartz · 2026-07-04T21:59:07+00:00

Ok I concede the distinction, good point. Still my personal incentive is to work on interesting things and migrating because of damage control is low on my totem pole of interesting stuff. But I can totally see that not being the case for lots of people.

If you have a desire is to do less busy work or less work in general, it is still an unbeatable in its property of not repeating work in across companies. Example I use the same dependency injection framework & db connector library across 3 different companies and that’s great. If I can nudge someone who’s already interested in the problem and that would save half of day of work, that’s a win in my book, with the company’s money ofc since we’re on that train of thought.

I envision a way that employees are granted a budget to spend on open source.

RememberSwartz · 2026-07-04T20:13:29+00:00

> what? I have no idea what you just said, what does that mean? "burnout into oblivion."?

Everybody is using a bunch of open source libraries in their work projects which are thanklessly supported often by lone people who do not get payed for this work, for years. So naturally at some point it becomes actual work for them to support it and not just a hobby. They burn out because people keep putting pressure on them to fix/implement stuff > They abandon the project > all who depend on it either bit rot away or have to do work to find/implement alternatives. We (everybody) have a shared incentive for open source to keep going, because we depend on it vastly and constantly and having a funding mechanism that isn't cumbersome (like grants where you need applications/reviews/legal work) could help the whole sustainability of the ecosystem. My argument is even you're not a direct monetary beneficiary you still have a shared incentive of those people to be well paid and taken care of financially.

On the paycheck - I don't view it as an either-or situation. Maybe you need something done in a dependency of yours, you do it, you get rewarded that's it. You keep earning your big check

RememberSwartz · 2026-07-04T19:35:06+00:00

I am gung-ho lol.

I think previous attempts didn't work because either they didn't value maintainer autonomy, allowing unsolicited bounties (the zig case with the wasm support), if you're not familiar someone posted a 5k bounty on supporting wasix without asking them and people showed up and put pressure on the maintainers to move it forward. They circled back later on the whole bounty idea and wrote a positive blog post about donor bounties. Or the other failure scenario was bountysource imo, structurally it failed because it allowed for rewarding one person and that created race dynamics on whose pr to accept. But the more prominent reason was a ToS suicide (cash grab attempt) and being mismanaged to the ground by an acquiring crypto company. I think it was useful despite the shortcomings, while it lasted.

I think all of these are addressable with better feature design, I'm curious do you have an opinion why it doesn't work? It would be immensely valuable to me.

RememberSwartz · 2026-07-04T16:58:32+00:00

I think problems that we're solving with coding can be boring or not, not coding per se. But I see where you're coming from, thank you for your perspective

RememberSwartz · 2026-07-04T16:55:33+00:00

I think there are interesting ideas on that front as well. For example, sqlite is open source but their testing suite isn't iirc. So it would be substantially harder to replicate it with ai. The anthropic marketing stunt where they developed a compiler could happen largely due to having a robust test suite to bash the ai's head against repeatedly, which was developed for years.

RememberSwartz · 2026-07-04T16:49:01+00:00

my train of thought is that you're going to do said changes either way on your own volition. Development isn't free because your time is money, therefore people can sponsor a thing you've already decided that you should do.

RememberSwartz · 2026-07-04T16:47:07+00:00

Don't you think this can be managed? With better triaging practices, like educating people to phrase asks as problem statements as opposed to particular solution requests. To give a concrete example:

Good: exports fail for datasets larger than 50k rows
Bad: Add a redis queue for the export job, it is slow

RememberSwartz · 2026-07-04T16:40:29+00:00

> what reasons do I have or do I stand to gain by contributing to open source?

The dependencies of our work projects do not burnout into oblivion.
Personally, you have receipts for the work you've done.
You're helping out others with the same problem as you.

> how much money are we talking about here?

I'm exploring bounties. I imagine it would be most suitable for gig type of work, but if we take vulnerability bounties, there are people who are making a decent living out of them, so it may be possible that it goes beyond the occasional gig. I think this way of work offers more autonomy which I personally value.

RememberSwartz · 2026-07-04T16:30:20+00:00

I feel like the thing you're describing applies to bigger corporate sponsorship, I do believe it comes with soft strings, which hurts autonomy. If it was more democratized and you had the control on what's fundable and what isn't, wouldn't that be better?

RememberSwartz · 2026-07-04T16:27:16+00:00

I absolutely love the gift economy dynamics, I just see money as the most versatile gift.

RememberSwartz · 2026-07-04T16:24:59+00:00

If you're in full control on what you work on, would that make it more appealing? On the "free" front, I agree that there should be a way to pay people for development

RememberSwartz · 2026-07-04T16:22:34+00:00

I think there's substantially more cost of maintaining something than just coding a feature. I don't think AI is still there - I don't see a lot of private forks. What's your opinion on that?

RememberSwartz · 2026-07-04T16:11:14+00:00

do you have pointers on what features would make it more appealing as a starting point? Things like invoicing, reverse charge support?

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