

They give the example of Tailwind CSS, who sell UI blocks/kits and templates. I think that sounds like more added value than just pay me to help you use my software.
This is already happening. Last month, Tailwinds—an open source CSS framework that helps people build websites—laid off three of its four engineers. Tailwinds is extremely popular, more popular than it’s ever been, but revenue has plunged.
Tailwinds head Adam Wathan explained why in a post on GitHub. “Traffic to our docs is down about 40% from early 2023 despite Tailwind being more popular than ever,” he said. “The docs are the only way people find out about our commercial products, and without customers we can’t afford to maintain the framework.
Even for projects that don’t advertise commercial products, I can believe that not needing to leave the chat/IDE to do anything leads to less traffic on GitHub etc, which is where the donate buttons are for ex.









I love citymapper, however it only covers a limited number of urban areas, is UK based and most importantly got bought by Via Transportation in 2023 (US based).
It seems like many city/regional operators have their own apps, this might be an option for you ?
You might also want to have a look at the apps that use transitous.org (listed on their homepage). Amongst them is cartes.app, which is a really exciting open source gmaps alternative wannabe, hosted in France (see cartes.app/roadmap for more technical details). Although it’s still a wip, they’ve made great strides recently and I’ve started using it to replace some of GMaps’ use cases. The only issue is, errrr, there’s no English interface for now :) It’s still a small team, so they’re keeping internationalisation for later.