I wish you the best of luck. I'm also using Patreon to sponsor my work on open source https://www.patreon.com/microhq. It's a great platform to enable this opportunity. I hope you receive more contributions to help you do it full time!

Wow, I'm impressed by your Patreon! Congrats :)

Cheers! If you build something of value people will pay for your efforts as long as you give them a way to :)

Totally agree!

I like the project itself but the emojis seem like an odd choice. Including them in a document that's intended to get people to pay you money seems unprofessional to me.

I could be totally wrong about that though, I don't use Patreon so I'm not sure what a page would usually look like. To be honest I've never really understood the culture or appeal of the whole Youtube/Podcasts/Patreon/Internet celebrities thing.

Dead wrong. Emojis make copy more personable and increase conversions.

Exactly that's the goal

It's a community project, not a contract :) So I try to be as close as possible from my community

Good luck for your project. Note that there is also Mycroft the Open Source Virtual assistant : https://mycroft.ai/

Are there many developers who make a living off of donations to their open source work? Curious about whether it's viable to build a career off of open source.

I've been rolling an idea around my head to interview and write up stories on some of these people. Here are some that fit (or come close to fitting) your description that I've been talking to:

- https://sindresorhus.com - https://github.com/slact - https://www.patreon.com/microhq - https://github.com/feross/thanks/blob/master/index.js

No, there aren't many. There are some living off of donations, but it's a very small number. Not something that I would consider a viable career option because it requires too much luck.