For the past two years (2023, 2024) I have been sharing annual sponsorship breakdowns for komorebi.

komorebi is published under the Komorebi License (building on the foundation laid by the PolyForm Project), an educational source license which does not permit any kind of commercial use.

In January 2025 I introduced the long-requested Individual Commercial Use License (ICUL), which will also be factored in to this year's financial breakdown.

The Numbers

In 2025 I received $12,070 for my work on komorebi.

GitHub Sponsors

Within a couple of months of the availability of the ICUL, the number of license holders had surpassed the number of GitHub Sponsors, and this trend shows no sign of reversing.

Generally I am happy with this because I would much rather that the majority of funding for komorebi come from corporate expense reimbursements than the salaries of workers.

In the last quarter of 2025 I started working on komorebi for Mac and made early access available as a perk to GitHub sponsors on the $10/month and $20/month tiers, which accounts for a significant portion of the $3629 figure attributed to GitHub Sponsors.

There were a number of people who generously paid for 12 months of the sponsorship tier up-front (I didn't know this was even possible until recently).

There were also many curious people who paid $10/month for one month of access before cancelling who either 1) found the current build stable enough to last them until the public release or 2) felt that komorebi's model wasn't a good fit for their workflow.

I think there is definitely more to explore in the area of giving sponsors early access to nightly releases and WIP features before they become generally available to the public in an official versioned release.

I am convinced that Sponsors remains GitHub's killer feature at this point, and that this is a table-stakes feature for any serious competitor in this space.

YouTube

I made fewer videos this year and spent time exploring different formats which were more time consuming, but more personally rewarding for me.

The videos which got the most views (and ad revenue) were the scripted tutorial and quickstart videos, which I guess I should probably put more time into this year.

I'm less interested in YouTube as a source of funding for komorebi now and more interested in the creative medium of video.

Ko-Fi

I mainly introduced Ko-Fi upon request when GitHub Sponsors made some changes which made it difficult for users in Europe to continue sponsoring on that platform.

It has a nice integration with Discord, but outside of that I didn't really engage much with it.

Individual Commercial Use License

Before introducing the ICUL, both my research and my experience in 2023 and 2024 had demonstrated that:

1. Corporations do not make voluntary financial contributions to software that improves the working conditions of their employees
2. Voluntary contributions in the form of sponsorship from individuals do not scale and are not sustainable in an environment where workers are a mass layoff and a medical emergency away from having their life savings wiped out

So I introduced the ICUL with a few thoughts in mind:

1. I want to normalize making employers pay for the ICUL
2. The ICUL should function as a mechanism to empower end users to mediate corporate contributions to the financial sustainability of independent software
3. If this goes well, the number of licenses should surpass the number of GitHub sponsors
4. If this goes well, other independent developers will start reaching out to me to learn more

The numbers from this year are very encouraging. There are currently 95 active ICULs and with the impending release of komorebi for Mac, I see that number crossing 100 within a month or two.

Many ICUL users have successfully had their licensing costs either reimbursed after paying out of pocket, or have had their licenses purchased on their behalf directly by their employers.

Unsurprisingly, many licenses have been purchased for workers in highly regulated industries.

More surprisingly, licenses have also been purchased by independent contractors, who told me that they simply increased their rate slightly to cover the cost of the tools required to do what they were contracted for.

In December 2025 both komorebi for Windows and komorebi for Mac started identifying potential corporate devices based on MDM enrollment status. This resulted in a wave of new ICUL purchases and a total payout of $1375 at the end of the month (~17% of the 2025 ICUL total in the table above).

This month, to coincide with the upcoming release of komorebi for Mac (and once again, upon request), I am also introducing a new multi-platform variant of the ICUL which covers both komorebi for Windows and komorebi for Mac at 1.5x the price of a single-platform license.

The Big Question

I assume many people will have clicked to read this article with some variation of the question "can I make a living independently selling my own software?" in mind.

I have been working on komorebi since 2020, and for me the answer to that question is still "no"; I still need a full-time job to be able to pay my rent and to have health insurance coverage.

However, when I look back at the last 3 years, the progress made towards this goal that many of us in this industry have is undeniable.

I think that I am on to something, and I think that my approach to building a financially sustainable independent software project is one that can be reproduced by other independent software developers focused on developer and/or power-user tooling.

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 solutions like this, 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 would like early access to komorebi for Mac, you can sponsor me on GitHub.