Its heavily (95%+) personal time donation from devs and users who try/test and give feedback. We're mostly working for free, or for some grant funds after applying and being for approved for such. There are a few VC funded projects.

Peoples opinions will differ on whether clients/products/services should be profitable, or even use other traditional revenue streams such as advertising. Im in favor of both, if done well with a positive experience for the user in mind

We need to be open to for profit ventures.

Go to opensats and who nostr:npub1sg6plzptd64u62a878hep2kev88swjh3tw00gjsfl8f237lmu63q0uf63m chose to fund via his charity to give you starting point to answer these questions.

You’re literally duplicating work of many others but it will be interesting to see the results. 🤣🙏🫡

a lot of funding info can be found from https://opensats.org/blog/2024-year-in-review

even "for profit" companies are to some extent subsidies with grants, which is good as at least some things get built but its also killing signal/noise ratio since grants don't really provide market signals as to what makes sense to build and what just exists because people have cashflow to do it

a lot of time and resources is being donate to the cause but sooner or later we need to figure out how to get ppl to pay for stuff and how to monetize things and the longer we supplement this with grants the longer we postpone the real world test of is there a market for this.

then again, freedom tech never pays so maybe we're just frontrunning this and silently admitting it to ourselves?

No negative connotation AT ALL. Quite the opposite. The very negative connotation would be companies trying to capture their users (whether their identity or their data) against their will.

I don’t speak for other devs, but I don’t see it as a donation, more as an investment.

Keep bringing up these questions, this is awesome 🤙

Hey buddy, check your DMs

Economic incentives are not the only incentives.

Prior to OpenSats grant, I was working on nostr without any economic incentive. I explicitly made gossip MIT licensed and took steps tp signal that I won't be adding "premium features" or "accounts" and that this is 100% open source. But why did I do it? Because I wanted a nostr client for myself that I love, that I can customize to my desired nostr experience. The fact that everybody else gets to use it does not detract from my ability to use it. So you are all getting it as a side-effect. I write the code for me.

But then I got an OpenSats grant, which basically means I can do this full time instead of in my spare time.

If some developers are focused on economic incentives, entrepreneural ambitions, monetization strategies... this is perfectly fine and a good thing. But it isn't necessary for nostr to thrive.

I'm looking into shopstr. Tried to zap ya but says error. Will try later...

I run a for profit edtech platform that wants to create scholarships with learning. Basically a way to zap students/teachers/schools every time you answer a question.

Currently it’s opt-in, so the platform is free. My incentive to build with nostr is that it creates a superior user experience to onboard and embed itself on algorithm based media platforms like TikTok and Instagram.

There are a number of unlocks that decentralized protocols create for education technology, but you have to focus super hard on UX over anything else.

Maybe nostr:npub1xtscya34g58tk0z605fvr788k263gsu6cy9x0mhnm87echrgufzsevkk5s has insights on this?

Being early to nostr might pay off big in the long run

The economic incentives are that Bitcoin will cause massive deflation in the world and allow nearly everyone to retire and spend time and energy building things we love for the better of humanity. Nostr gets us to that point quicker.

In the meantime, grants and donations to devs seem to be the best way to support development.

/Developers can offers paid relay service too, open relay service and operate it for user to publish content or retrieve data , stabile income stream (relay fees )

/Tipping with zap or lightning network

/application monetization , dev can make app user friendly nostr app

/open source sponsorship

IMO any business model that can be run on the net can be run better on Nostr.

I'd say we celebrate those early nostriches that got profitable. Nostr.wine and nostr:nprofile1qqsv73dxhgfk8tt76gf6q788zrfyz9dwwgwfk3aar6l5gk82a76v9fgpz4mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduhszxthwden5te0wfjkccte9eekummjwsh8xmmrd9skctcppemhxue69uhkummn9ekx7mp0dutak6 for example.

No negative connotation. Just happens to be the case that the bulk of those actually turning a profit with Bitcoin involved companies decided to go to the dark side and mess around with scammy shitcoinery like ordinals, runes, Liquid, and other nonsense. Anchorwatch and Casa are two profitable (or at least, potentially profitable) companies in the space doing some pretty great work in their particular fields. Ocean Mining pool is another doing God's work for an appropriate fee.