klaro

Most of the time your users will become your contributors. That's mostly true for libraries targeted at developers, but even if you build software for non-technical users some of them will be developers and will eventually contribute. Don't expect your community to build large features for you, even though that happens from time to time my experience is more that most people contribute small patches and improvements. That's great too because the small things can be quite time-consuming, so if your community has your back on things like documentation or translations it can help a lot. One of our latest open-source projects is Klaro (https://github.com/kiprotect/klaro), an open-source consent manager for websites. We already got some really great contributions from our community, most people that contributed did so to solve a problem they h

We're in the process of monetizing an open-source project as well (Klaro - https://github.com/kiprotect/klaro). The project started as a "weekend hack" for our own website and became quite popular over time, to the points that it's used on thousands of websites already. We plan to keep the client software (i.e. the part that runs in the browser) open-source and feature-complete. We want to charge for backend services (managing consent data, scanning websites) and comfort features like a graphical configuration editor. That way we hope to enable users to still get great free value from the open-source version while allowing us to raise money for the development. Contrary to some other voices here we had great community contributions to our project right from the start: For example, almost all translations are contributed by the community

Small changes in UI can have a significant effect on acceptance rate. I'm developing an open-source consent tool (Klaro - https://klaro.kiprotect.com, Github: https://github.com/kiprotect/klaro) and where to put the different buttons, which colors to give to them and how easy to make opt-out is a large debate in our community. By default we favor a very user-friendly approach but we give our users (i.e. the website owners) different ways to ask for consent: A mandatory modal, a consent flow that accepts all cookies/apps (or customize) and a consent flow that accepts only a pre-selection of cookies/apps by default. In every flow there's a "Decline" button that visitors can use, so declining consent is just as easy as giving it. Most website publishers prefer the "Accept all" flow as they usually have a good reason for including a given app