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Going full-time on open source (jdx)

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title
Going full-time on open source (jdx)
type
summary
summary
Jeff Dickey leaves Figma to work full-time on mise and friends under en.dev, with $600/month of OSS income at announcement and a tiered sponsorship plan
tags
open-source, maintainer-experience, oss-sustainability
sources
jdx-going-full-time-oss
created
2026-05-06
updated
2026-05-06

In April 2026 Jeff Dickey (jdx) announced that he has left Figma to work full-time on his open-source projects under a new umbrella called en.dev. The flagship is mise (formerly rtx), now sitting around 27k GitHub stars and the 10th most-downloaded Homebrew formula. The post is half announcement, half pitch deck for sustainability.

What's under en.dev

mise is the project most people know — a polyglot runtime/task manager that has eaten the niches asdf, direnv, and Make used to share. The other tools under the same umbrella are aube, hk, pitchfork, fnox, and usage. They get attention as bandwidth allows; mise is what en.dev is built around.

Why now

The reason given is operational rather than philosophical. mise grew faster than a part-time maintainer could service. Dickey says he had to "declare notification bankruptcy every few weeks" — which is the maintainer-experience version of inbox zero through deletion. He wants mise to keep improving rather than slowly stall on weekends.

The numbers at announcement

  • ~$100/month from ads in the docs
  • ~$500/month from GitHub Sponsors

So about $600/month total. Not livable. The whole post is structurally a plan to multiply that.

The pitch

Individual memberships range from $5/month (Supporter) to $50+/month (Patron), with two intermediate tiers. Members get Discord access, bi-weekly Q&As, mentions, and a newsletter. Corporate tiers are $200+/month (Backer) and $1,000+/month (Sustainer). On top of that he offers up to two days a week of consulting — migration help, custom plugin development. Hosted mise-for-teams services are floated as a future option without specifics.

The framing he uses is worth keeping: "sustainability so that I can build OSS tools, not building a SaaS." en.dev is a one-person operation today, with explicit intent to hire a second maintainer once revenue allows so mise's bus factor goes above 1.

What this post is and isn't

It's a single maintainer's announcement and funding ask, not a manifesto about OSS economics. There's no broader argument that the model is broken or that anyone else should follow this path. No runway figure is given, so we don't know how long he can sustain the experiment if revenue doesn't move. The interesting data point is the absolute revenue floor of a project at the very top of the developer-tools long tail: 27k stars and top-10 Homebrew formula status converts to roughly $600/month in passive sponsorships before any active fundraising. That's the number to remember.

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