Going full-time on open source

Jeff Dickey announces he has left Figma to work full-time on his open-source projects under a new umbrella, en.dev. The flagship is mise (formerly rtx), a polyglot tool/runtime/task manager that crossed 27k GitHub stars and is now the 10th most downloaded Homebrew formula. mise turns up in places like OpenAI Codex Universal and NVIDIA OpenShell.

The other projects under en.dev: aube, hk, pitchfork, fnox, and usage. mise is the flagship; the rest get attention as bandwidth allows.

Why now

As mise grew, the workload became impossible to handle alongside a full-time job. Dickey says he could not keep up with PR review and "had to declare notification bankruptcy every few weeks." He wants mise to keep improving rather than stall on his spare time.

Philosophy

He frames the goal as "sustainability so that I can build OSS tools, not building a SaaS." en.dev starts as a one-person operation with the explicit intent to add a second maintainer once revenue allows, so mise's bus factor goes above 1.

Current revenue

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

So roughly $600/month at announcement time. Insufficient to live on.

How en.dev plans to make money

Individual memberships:

• Supporter: $5/month or $50/year
• Member: $10/month or $100/year
• Sustaining Member: $20/month or $200/year
• Patron: $50+/month or $500+/year

Members get Discord access, mentions, bi-weekly Q&As, and a newsletter.

Corporate sponsorships:

• Backer: $200+/month
• Sustainer: $1,000+/month

Consulting: up to two days a week, for migration help and custom plugin work.

Future hosted services for mise teams are mentioned but undetermined.

How readers can help

• Sign up for a membership tier
• Sponsor via GitHub Sponsors
• For companies, sponsor en.dev directly or hire him for consulting

No explicit runway figure is given.