Jeff Dickey left Figma to maintain mise full-time under en.dev, funding via memberships, consulting, and corporate sponsorships.
Key Takeaways
mise has 27k+ GitHub stars and is the 10th most downloaded Homebrew formula; roughly 1% of all brew install runs are brew install mise.
Current revenue is only ~$600/mo ($100 ads + $500 GitHub Sponsors); membership tiers range from $5/mo to $500+/yr, corporate sponsor tiers from $200/mo to $1,000+/mo.
Consulting capped at 2 days/week for mise adoption: monorepo migrations, CI wiring, custom plugins, secrets/env-var audits; rates are intentionally high.
Portfolio beyond mise includes hk, pitchfork, fnox, aube, and usage; bus-factor concern is explicit, with plans to hire a second maintainer if funds allow.
Paid hosted services are on the roadmap but undefined; author is soliciting ideas from teams already using mise at work.
Hacker News Comment Review
Small thread with limited technical depth; the one substantive signal is that a maintainer’s curatorial judgment (what to say no to) is seen as the durable, AI-resistant value here.
One commenter dismissed the venture by citing a claim that OSS will be AI-authored exclusively by 2027, framing human maintainers as obsolete – this is a minority provocation, not a consensus view.
Notable Comments
@wek: “the value is in what gets into the stream” – argues feature restraint is the irreplaceable human contribution.
