AKA: Bounty driven Development
Payment offers made by companies or individuals to develop new features, functionalities, interfaces, etc. important to their business-case. Often these are one-time payment offers for one feature, but hundred of users have thousands of feature requests.
Requires:
- Setup of a payment mechanism (hosted or self-build)
- Collection and description of one or more feature with time
Variants & Options:
- Single Feature: Development of one request
- Bulk Features: Implementation of multiple features (border on freelance contracting)
- Auctioned Feature development: Highest bidder gets to choose the feature to implement next
- Custom Features: Development of features that only the buyer gets
| Characteristics | Value | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Effort to set-up | Hours | Some descriptions and bank info is sufficient |
| Effort to maintain | High | New description for every new feature & feature development |
| Cost to set-up | None | Platforms are often free or only take a small cut |
| Cost to maintain | None | Platforms are often free or only take a small cut |
| One-time Income | Medium | Often based on hourly wage |
| Recurring Income | Low | Feature requests never cease but payers might |
| Income Predictability | Low | Too few features --> no users; Too many features --> no income |
| Full income Threshold | 100+ | |
| Recipient | I | |
| Additional Work | Medium | Extra work to develop feature |
| Visibility | Medium | Every new issue will be a reminder for the issue bounties |
| Necessity to pay | Medium | Might be necessary for important issues |
| Entry Threshold | Low | Credit card is sufficient |
| Countervalue | Work | |
| Scalability | Low | Scales to the time available to develop features |
| Effort for marketing | High | |
| Competitors | O | Might be constrained to maintainers (i.e., rejecting pull requests from external contributors / developers) |
| Software types | All |
NOTE: If external contributors develop features and maintainers accept the changes the bounties are paid to the contributors and not the the maintainers of the project. This might be hindering the monetization effort of the OSS project by the maintainers.