My First Month Selling Commercial Use Software Licenses

I made $901.49 in my first month selling commercial use software licenses.

This $901.49 came from 14 customers, 6 of whom purchased monthly license subscriptions and 8 of whom purchased annual license subscriptions.

My most popular piece of software, komorebi, is a tiling window manager for Windows, published under an educational source license which does not permit any kind of commercial use.

At the beginning of 2025, I started offering dedicated individual commercial use licenses for people who want to use it at work.

These are the main steps that I took in January to disseminate information about the new license:

• I run a community Discord server centered around komorebi with almost 2000 members - I pinged @everyone with a launch announcement, which was positively received

• In the release overview video for komorebi v0.1.32 I dedicated a section to introduce the license to my ~4000 YouTube subscribers (and potentially to new viewers)

• I set up webhooks to notify the community Discord server whenever someone purchases a license subscription

• I did a little cross-promotion with Val Town who were very helpful in guiding me on how to set up the subscription webhooks

• I launched a new video series, Rice Rice Baby, aimed at a broader audience, where I’ll also be dedicating sections to talk about the individual commercial use license

The outcome of the first month is honestly far better than I dared hope for when I was preparing to launch the license in late December.

If you read my GitHub Sponsorship breakdown for 2024, you’ll know that $901.49 is almost half of what I made through sponsorships for the whole of last year.

I am cautiously optimistic that the rest of the year will see similar monthly revenue as the viewership of my YouTube channel and the visibility of the GitHub repository (10,000+ stars as of this month!) both continue to grow.

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.