I've been working on a side project, mydevportfol.io for about 2 years now (on and off). It's finally at a point where it's good enough that people are willing to pay for it, which is an incredible feeling.

I woke this morning a a Stripe notification that I'd gotten a sale overnight. Amazing! Definitely a great start to the day.

But then I opened my emails and saw I had a message from a disgruntled user, that I had wasted their time because they thought it was free...

These were two different people of course, and maybe it's just a natural thing to happen as more people find your app, and I think maybe as devs we're just used to cool stuff on the internet being free.

But as devs I also think we need to make sure that our work is valued, and we should know that software isn't free. Sure, sometimes we'll build cool stuff and put it out there just for the fun of it - eg a chrome extension for managing other chrome extensions I built with a friend a while back, but that doesn't mean EVERYTHING we build has to be free.

Just wanted to share - I'm a big proponent of letting people pay you for your work via donation buttons or putting a price tag on your side project - but happy to hear other thoughts.