What's so bad about charging for a service or for tools? Just because some of the MegaCorps offer Javascript frameworks + tools for free, why shouldn't a small competitor be charging a bit of money for work that is built on top of the free framework to keep it financially sustainable?

It's an optional purchase for people who might want to rather save time, e.g. when you're a small dev team trying to build something, you need to calculate the opportunity costs.

Furthermore, sometimes I will even refuse to use a service if they don't charge money. The interests of a service will often be aligned to those who give the money. So if the money is not coming from me, the supposed customer, it has to come from someone else.

What is wrong with that?

Indeed, i dont get the "i want to make money by using software by peple who are not allowed to make money"

Nothing is stopping you from building those components yourself. Or, you can pay the author who’s already done the work for you.

I think it’s a great way to monetise an open source project.

Why are some dev so cheap? Everywhere else you want great tools, you are willing to pay the price. Especially if they help you earn something in return.

That's a strange mindset *pondering*

You can definitely build these components yourself.

If you are a developer or a company using open source buying components and even training courses is like printing money.

It's an investment to save time and level up your skills and put out better software in less time with more polish.

Have you checked out TailwindUI. It literally replaced having a designer at our startup. Amazing value.

If you're not paying for tools you're leaving money on the table.

Plus supporting open source means the maintainer can make improvements that wouldn't be possible otherwise.

Support, Learn, Save Time, Profit!

but, there are many paid component libraries out there, for various different frameworks, right? other than this being first-party, what’s the difference?

Creator of Alpine here! Those components are the reason I can work on open source full-time. If I didn't charge for anything, I wouldn't be able to pour as much effort into these tools.

thanks for your great work on alpinejs, i use alpinejs with django on all most of my works. eagerly waiting for headless-ui for alpine to be realesed.

Hi Caleb. Great work. Please continue keeping it simple and stable. I love that about alpine

I really enjoy Alpine.js and am happily financially supporting the components. Also enjoying the development of the component explanations.

Keep up the good work, all the developers I know who are clear thinking know that open source engineers need to make a living too. Thanks for your work.