A Shot in the Arm from Open Source
This month’s newsletter goes over the financials from my sixth year running a single person design and development studio
It is June. It is summer. It is hot. And it is time for my annual financial reporting for my sixth year running the company. I ended last year’s financials post on a determined front: I did not want to have the anxiety of money feeling tight at the end of the year. So, I front loaded the first half of 2025 with more work than usual.1 Let us take a look to see how that played out to end 2025 and into 2026.
From a revenue perspective, there was a steady decline for the rest of 2025. I worked maybe too hard for the first half of 2025. I juggled as many as 4 large client projects at the same time. But, I took an almost three week vacation in July to Europe. I was really able to disconnect during the vacation because I knew my bank account was padded enough for personal expenses. This confidence led me into the end of 2025 where I explored: the Typatone revamp,2 Living Encyclopedia v2 for Dataland,3 and a grant given to me by Github.4 Ironically, I was as busy as ever. Those pursuits did not make as much money, but were enriching in their own rights. You can read more about each of them in the linked posts in the footnotes.
The shift to more personally compelling work is evident in the graphic above. It depicts my personal and commercial output splits as defined by Github commits. The last half of 2025 I was able to squeeze in time to experiment with two new open source libraries: react-two.js5 and Force Directed Graph.6 Both of which have ended up in client projects in 2026. I wish I could say there is a healthy synergy between my open source efforts and client work. But, the reality is it continues to be elliptical. Client work dominates my time and attention. And 2026 is no different. The year has been marked by two massive projects: the public launch of Dataland (we recently completed our first week open) and a client project under NDA. The massive increase in revenue in May 2025 is simply stacking months of work into a single invoice.
As you can see from our final graphic, the year-over-year trends in revenue streams and commit history, 2026 is on track with 2025 numbers. The revenue comes from client work. This makes my focus client work. The one irregularity is the purple spike in subscription revenue this past year. Github’s grant was disbursed as a subscription. It made a meaningful impact for a couple of months to shift my priorities. And I would happily do it again.
One observation I had while assembling these graphics: I expected the general output of commits (commercial or personal) to increase steadily over this year. As I shifted from writing code, to managing AI agents and reviewing the code they made, I assumed my general productivity increased.7 Hence the expectation of increased commits. To my surprise, it only marginally increased over last year. Perhaps as an individual contributor, there is only so much I can pay attention to even if I am not writing it myself.
In closing, I kept it simple this year. I worked hard. I showed up for my clients. I took a break in the summer. I front loaded the year, but ended up working just as much by the end of it. If you see anything in the numbers, do not hesitate to share your thoughts in the comments.
–Jono
