The open-source sponsor problem — Templater has 3.9M downloads and 6 active sponsors

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I just wrote a piece about something that’s been bugging me, and I think this community should see the numbers.

Templater — one of the most essential plugins in the Obsidian ecosystem — has 3,891,003 downloads. Nearly four million. It’s been maintained across 134 releases and 751 commits over 5.4 years.

It currently has 6 active GitHub sponsors.

That’s a 0.0013% sponsor rate. One out of every 77,820 people who downloaded it thought the work was worth even $1.

I donated $50 to SilentVoid13 yesterday — not as charity, but because I use Templater every single day and it provides real value. I wrote up my thoughts on why the open-source economy is broken and what we can do about it:

I Just Donated $50 to a Stranger on the Internet. You Should Too.

The short version: if you use open-source Obsidian plugins — and we all do — find one creator today and sponsor them. $1. $5. The amount matters less than the signal.

Here’s SilentVoid’s sponsor page if you want to start there: github.com/sponsors/SilentVoid13

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Does SilentVoid still maintain the plugin? I haven’t been in the Obsidian community long so don’t know the history, but I’m under the impression that they do not.

Might it be more relevant to your reasoning to sponsor Zachatoo?

Contributions: Contributors to SilentVoid13/Templater · GitHub

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Thanks for the headsup, I hadn’t invested enough time digging..
You’re right, Zachatoo’s been workin at it.
Still.. I reckon my point is still valid :upside_down_face:

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