awesome-oss-monetization

Monetization via Paid Consultation

Payment offers made by companies or individuals to get face-to-face consultation time with the maintainer(s) in form of workshops, talks, or pair programming sessions. Often these bookings are one-time payments for one consultation, but many users might have need for consultation.

Requires:

• Setup of a payment mechanism (hosted or self-build)
• Might require the legal status of Freelancer (country-specific)
• Optionally, setup of a platform to conduct pair-programming sessions
• Optionally, preparation of slides for specific talks and seminars
• Optionally, preparation of examplary code for workshops
• Time to conduct the consultation

Variants & Options:

• Pair-programming: Maintainers works with client directly to understand the product or fix a problem
• Workshop: Maintainer works with a customer’s team to understand and work with the product
• Talk: Maintainer gives a talk about using the product
• Auctioned Consultation: Highest bidder gets a time-slot for consultation

Platforms

• Codementor (Mentorship and Pair-programming support)

Evaluation

Characteristics	Value	Note
Effort to set-up	Days	Requires a booking platform and banking info. Might require freelance status
Effort to maintain	Medium	Constant reminders to consult might be necessary. Updating slides or acquaintance with customer’s problems might be necessary
Cost to set-up	None
Cost to maintain	None
One-time Income	Medium	Often based on hourly wage - but can grow with demand
Recurring Income	Low	Only for longer projects with companies
Income Predictability	Low	Too complex –> no users; Too easy to understand –> no income
Full income Threshold	100+	clients per month;
Recipient	I
Additional Work	Medium	Extra time to consult necessary
Visibility	Medium	Easy to forget, ignore, or overlook, but community might talk about it
Necessity to pay	Low	Might increase with the complexity of the software
Entry Threshold	Low	Credit card is sufficient
Countervalue	Work
Scalability	Low	Scales to the time available to consult
Effort for marketing	High
Competitors	O
Software types	All	Better for fast changing software

NOTE: Potentially, the consultations can also be done by non-maintainers (i.e., just an expert), which could increase the competition.

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