I maintain several open source projects. A few are healthy, a few are barely hanging on, and one nearly drained my desire to work in this field at all. "Free software" keeps getting read as "costs nothing," and I'm one of the people who pays for that misreading.
Several projects, several states
Most writing about maintainer burnout is a post-mortem of one project. I have those too, but it's not what the work looks like week to week. Week to week, I'm keeping a handful of things alive, and they're not in the same shape:
- Some are active. Regular releases, open issues, people who show up. This is the good kind of busy.
- Some are coasting. They're stable and mostly done, but dependencies drift and security advisories don't care that the code is finished.
- Some are barely alive. I haven't touched them in a while, people still install them, and every few weeks someone asks if they're dead.
- Some I walked away from, publicly. They still follow me around.
A project doesn't get cheap when it stops growing. It just starts costing in a different way, and usually shows up when something breaks.
The money
I only tracked costs carefully on one project, the one that was 100% self-funded. The expenses weren't dramatic: hosting, domains, tooling, much of which can be shared across projects. A few subscriptions that were cheaper to pay for than to replace. It ran me a few hundred USD a year. That's not ruinous, but it's real money going to something that pays nothing, and I wince every time a renewal comes due.
I turned on sponsorships. Over three years I got exactly two donations, for a grand total of $6. I've come to terms with that. I don't think of it as stinginess. I think of it as a lack of awareness. People don't see the cost, and they don't see the maintainer. They see a free tool, and they use it. That's what free means. I will never fault a user for that. I do fault large companies that depend on open source but don't sponsor it. They have the money, and they have the awareness. They just don't care.
Eventually I added ads to the documentation. I'm against advertising on principle, and it stung more than the money justified. It felt like admitting the project couldn't pay for itself any other way, which was true. The ads brought in roughly 10 dollars a month. That helped, and I'm glad I had it, but $120 a year still didn't cover the bill.
The project had somewhere between 10,000 and 100,000 installs. So: tens of thousands of installs, two small donations. Nobody sees an invoice for open source, so nobody thinks to pay it.
The license is free so the lawyers are happy, but the maintainer is still paying.
The time
I work a full-time job at 45+ hours a week, and I have a spouse and a kid, a couple of dogs. Open source is a hobby, and it has to stay one if I want to stay sane. That leaves a thin slice of time, and every project I add takes a bite out of the same slice.
Dependencies are the worst of it. Vetting updates takes a few hours a week per project. Automation helps, and these days AI is close to a necessity. Bots open the pull requests and CI runs the tests. But a human still has to read the changelog, decide whether a minor bump is really minor, and own the result when it breaks something downstream. A green checkmark won't tell you a transitive dependency just changed hands. Someone has to look.
Then there's the work that never shows up in a commit log. Triaging issues. Answering the same question for the fortieth time. Chasing a bug that turns out to be somebody's misconfigured environment. Writing a careful reply to a request I was always going to decline. None of it ships anything.
So the fun parts, the bug fixes and new features, and solving real problems, happen in the cracks. A lunch break. A half hour after the kid goes to bed. The thing I signed up for, building something good and having fun doing something I love, ends up last on the list.
What stings isn't really the hours. It's what they displace. Every evening on a project is an evening I didn't spend with my family, or catching up on ever growing stack of books I'd love to read, or resting, and I don't get those back.
The people
Most users are silent or kind. Some are generous in ways I think about for days afterward. A well-written bug report with a reproduction is a gift, and a short thank-you message can carry me through a bad week.
A small minority are entitled and rude, though, and they tend to control the narrative. It shows up most with niche feature requests built around one person's exact setup, and with bug reports that come with an opinion about where they rank on my list. Their bug isn't getting enough priority compared to everyone else's. Sometimes that's said politely. Often it isn't.
You'd think a handful of unpleasant messages would be easy to shrug off against thousands of quiet users. It isn't. The quiet users are quiet. The rude ones land in my inbox and my notifications, and they're still in my head at dinner. Thanks are one line. Complaints run long and keep arriving.
Across the years, a few people have sent me pull requests. Most of the ones that arrived got merged. I actually enjoy reviewing them, and I appreciate the time and thought that went into them.
Every now and then, though, a request comes in that I can't accept. It might be a change that would break something for someone else, or a feature that doesn't fit the project's goals. Turning down a request is an awkward job when someone has spent an evening on it. But thousands of installs and a trickle of help is a lopsided deal.
Every change has consequences. Fixing a bug for user X breaks something for user Y, because Y came to rely on the old behavior. Reverting it for Y brings X back. There's rarely a version that makes everyone happy, and I'm the one who picks who gets to be unhappy. After a while I started dreading releases. A release meant a day or two of waiting to find out who I'd just broken.
The one I left
The project that hurt most is the one I stepped away from, about two years ago, publicly. I wrote it up, said I was no longer involved, and pointed people to alternatives that were actively maintained.
I still get hate mail. People write to me, upset that I'm not prioritizing their request. I've explained again, publicly, that I'm not the maintainer anymore. I've linked the alternatives. It makes no difference. Two years later, someone is still angry at me about a project I don't work on.
I think about that more than I'd like. People treat maintainers like a service, and you can complain to a service forever because you can't cancel it. Nobody seems to remember that we're volunteers who gave something away.
I'm still proud of the work I did on that project, and I'm glad I walked away. It was the right call for me, and it was the right call for the project. It was a hard decision, but it was the right one.
It took me a long time to feel okay about it (honestly, I still struggle sometimes), and some days I don't want to code at all.
Where AI fits
AI is making the load heavier, and I'd be lying if I said otherwise. Bug reports and pull requests are cheap to produce now, and they often look right at a glance. That's what makes them expensive. Someone has to work out whether the stack trace is real, whether the fix does what it claims, and whether the author understands what they sent. The effort used to sit with the person writing. Now it sits with the person reading, and the reader is a maintainer with a day job.
AI didn't cause any of this, though. The funding gap, the entitled requests, and the lopsided ratio of users to contributors were all here long before these tools showed up. So were the companies that depend on a package and never pay for it. AI makes an old problem bigger. The same tools also help me get through dependency updates, so I'm on both sides of it.
If we only blame the tools, we'll fix the tools and leave the underlying problem exactly where it was.
What it costs everyone else
I'm not the only one burning out. I know other maintainers who have quietly gone through some version of this, and I've watched projects go silent for the same reasons.
When a maintainer burns out, the project doesn't vanish. It goes stale. Issues pile up, security fixes slow down, and the people depending on it find out at the worst possible time. Everyone downstream pays for that, including the companies that never sent a dollar upstream.
If your product breaks when a certain open source package breaks, that package is part of your infrastructure. You just don't get an invoice for it. Somebody is paying anyway, and right now it's often a tired person with a day job.
What would help
If you work at a company that depends on open source, here's where to start:
- Sponsor the maintainers of the packages you can't ship without. Even a modest recurring amount is more than most projects see.
- Give an engineer paid time to contribute upstream, including the boring work like triage, docs, and dependency upkeep.
- Send the fix along with the report. A pull request with a test is worth more than a polite issue.
- Ask the maintainer what they need before you ask for what you want.
If you're an individual user, the bar is low. Say thanks. Read the docs before you open an issue. A real person is reading your message, and they may have read nine others like it today.
If you're a maintainer: you're allowed to stop. You can say no, close the issue, turn off notifications, or hand the project to someone else. The software will be fine, and you matter more than the repo.
Why I'm still here
I thought seriously about quitting all of it. I'm still here, and the reasons are small.
The healthy projects remind me why I started. Someone finds the thing, it saves them an afternoon, and now and then they tell me so. People who send a pull request, even a rough one, make me feel like part of a team instead of a help desk. And setting limits has helped more than I expected. "Here's what I can do and here's what I can't" sounds rude until you say it a few times. The people worth keeping around accept it.
I'd like maintaining to be something a person can do for years without losing a piece of themselves. I think that's possible. It needs users who remember there's a person on the other end, and companies willing to pay for what they depend on. Maintainers have to give themselves permission to rest, too.
I haven't solved this for my own projects. But I'm still maintaining them, and next time you hit "install" on something that saves you a week, find the sponsor link. It takes about a minute.
