In 2024 I received $1861.88 in sponsorships via GitHub Sponsors for my work on komorebi, the tiling window manager for Windows, which has continued to grow beyond my wildest dreams; it currently has 10k stars on GitHub, 106k downloads and almost 2000 members in the community Discord.

komorebi

Below is the monthly breakdown of the sponsorship payouts received in 2024:

Month Payout
January $92.35
February $115.48
March $143.03
April $150.30
May $188.39
June $158.49
July $122.83
August $144.12
September $179.28
October $116.09
November $229.00
December $222.52

In the post covering 2023, I wrote:

It’s unlikely that I’ll hit the $100 minimum payout threshold on the channel in 2024, but technically, the work I put into the YouTube channel in 2023 has opened the possibility for users to financially support the project in a passive way by subscribing to the channel and watching videos.

In February 2024 my YouTube channel became monetized. I have continued posting live development and release overview videos to the channel throughout this year, and I was able to receive one minimum payout of $100 in October.

I used this payout to purchase a $100 ad campaign on an updated komorebi quickstart video, which directly gained the channel 208 new subscribers ($0.48 per new subscriber).

In late 2024 I finally took the jump to switch from the PolyForm Strict License to the Komorebi License, which continues to be a personal use-only educational source license prohibiting commerical use, while explicitly allowing changes for personal use and upstream contributions (which the PolyForm Strict License was lacking).

In 2025 I will be introducing the long-requested and long-awaited Individual Commercial Use License as a paid subscription which will cover the most significant use case of “using komorebi at $DAYJOB”, and hopefully reduce headaches for compliance departments.

I remain so grateful to every single person who has ever financially sponsored komorebi. Thank you for joining me on this wild ride!

If you have any questions or comments you can reach out to me on Bluesky and Mastodon.

If you’re interested in what I read to come up with software like komorebi, you can subscribe to my Software Development RSS feed.

If you’d like to watch me writing code while explaining what I’m doing, you can also subscribe to my YouTube channel.

If you found this content valuable, or if you are a happy user of the komorebi tiling window manager or my NixOS starter templates, please consider sponsoring me on GitHub or tipping me on Ko-fi.