Not Everything Is About The Money

There’s an assumption people make about hobbyist developers that I find quietly exhausting. It goes something like: you must want to monetise this eventually. Or, slightly more charitable: have you considered turning this into a business? Or, the classic, offered as if it’s a compliment: you could really make money with this.

I appreciate the sentiment. I genuinely do. But the answer is no, and I want to explain why, because “no” on its own apparently doesn’t land.

Why I Build Things

I build things because I enjoy it. That’s the whole of it. Not because I have a roadmap, not because I’m building a portfolio to impress recruiters, not because I’ve identified a gap in the market. Because I woke up one morning and thought this problem is annoying and I want to solve it, and then I did. And then I did it again. And again. And somewhere along the way it became a fairly substantial pile of software that I maintain for no reason other than the fact that I still find it interesting.

The projects aren’t a side hustle waiting to happen. Malachite is a scrobble importer because I was frustrated that one didn’t exist for AT Protocol. Bismuth is a Markdown converter because I wanted my own content back in a usable format. Socialsync is a Minecraft mod because I thought it would be funny to bridge my PDS to a block game. None of that has a business case. None of it is supposed to.

The Paywall Conversation

The pressure doesn’t come from strangers on the internet. It comes from family. People who know me, who mean well, and who keep suggesting — repeatedly, with genuine good intentions — that I should put my software behind a paywall.

No.

I’ve said it calmly. I’ve said it with explanation. I’ve said it in the middle of conversations that started about something else entirely. The answer has not changed and is not going to change. The software is free because I want it to be free, because I built it for fun, and because the moment I attach a price to it I’ve turned a hobby into an obligation. I have enough of those already.

I understand why the suggestion keeps coming up. There’s a reasonable-sounding logic to it: you put in the effort, you should get something back. But that framing only makes sense if the effort was ever about getting something back, and it wasn’t. It was about building something that didn’t exist yet, because the absence of it was annoying me.

What makes it worse is that this isn’t even a software-specific conversation. I’ve had the exact same loop about my poetry. Over 180 poems since February 2020, and at some point someone decided the correct response to that was to ask whether I’d considered selling them. Poetry. The thing famously known for its enormous profit margins and dedicated commercial fanbase.

The answer was the same then. It’s the same now. The medium changes; the assumption doesn’t. If you made it, apparently someone will find a way to suggest you monetise it — which tells you less about the thing you made and more about how thoroughly the idea of creative output as revenue stream has embedded itself into how people think. You make something, therefore you must want something back. The possibility that the making was the point seems genuinely difficult for some people to process.

On the Ko-fi Thing

I do have a Ko-fi and a GitHub Sponsors. The Ko-fi nets me £13.22 a month after fees — £15 in, £13.22 out — and GitHub Sponsors is currently sitting at zero. That’s the full picture. I’m not being coy about it; those are just the numbers.

The £13.22 is kind, and I mean that sincerely. It covers roughly a third of a domain renewal. But I would have built all of this anyway, and if it disappeared tomorrow, the commit history would look exactly the same.

The Broader Problem

Here’s the thing I keep running into: tech, as an industry, has a terminal case of enshittification. Every tool, every platform, every piece of software that starts out genuinely useful eventually gets optimised for extraction — paywalls, subscriptions, data harvesting, dark patterns, the slow transformation of something people loved into something that merely tolerates them in exchange for their money or their attention.

I love software. I genuinely do. I find it interesting in a way that’s hard to fully articulate — the problem-solving, the architecture, the small satisfaction of something working cleanly. But I hate what the industry keeps doing to it. The assumption that the end goal of any project is financial gain. That if something is good, the correct response is to monetise it before someone else does. That “sustainable” means “profitable” rather than “maintained by someone who still finds it worth doing.”

The paywall suggestion, coming from family, comes from that same cultural background. It’s so thoroughly the assumed direction of travel that it doesn’t even register as an assumption — it’s just obvious. Of course you’d charge for it. Of course that’s where this is going.

It’s not where this is going.

What Actually Motivates Me

The honest version is that I build things for the same reason I write poems and play tabletop RPGs: because the process is satisfying, and the output is something that exists in the world that didn’t before, and that feels like enough.

There’s also a more specific thing going on with most of my software, which is that it’s anti-entropy infrastructure in disguise. Sync tools. Archive utilities. Identity plumbing. Things that keep data in your hands instead of someone else’s. That motivation isn’t financial at all — it’s almost the opposite of financial, given that the financial incentive in tech is generally to trap your data somewhere proprietary and charge for access.

I find that sort of architecture offensive. So I build alternatives. For free. Because I want them to exist.

The only thing I actually want from any of this is for the software to be useful to the people who use it. That’s it. That’s the whole ambition. It’s a low bar, and I’m happy with it. Financially uninteresting, admittedly.

One last thing, for the avoidance of doubt: I’m not opposed to being paid for my work. I take commissions, and at some point — whenever that ends up being — I’ll get a junior developer role and be paid like a normal person. That’s where the money comes from. Not the hobby projects. Not the poetry. Those stay free, because they were never the point. The moment a hobby becomes a revenue stream, it stops being a hobby — and I’d quite like to keep these ones.