The future of Mantine DataTable

I am kind of tired, but really satisfied. After a month of assiduous work, I just released the new version of Mantine DataTable, that works with Mantine V7, Next.js 14, and React Server Components.

The project was born more than a year ago, in August 2022, after I came in contact with Mantine - probably the best UI library for React out there (and I believe I am unbiased when saying this - back then, I had experience with a few other React UI libraries, such as Blueprint.js, MaterialUI and Ant Design).

But Mantine didn't have a baked-in data-table / data-grid component (as Ant Design had, for instance), and lots of people, myself included, were feeling the pain. I completely understood the fact that building such a component would have been too big of an undertaking to include in Mantine's core, hence my idea of building one myself.

Fast forward 13 months later, Mantine DataTable became a widely-used library, known and loved (I'd dare say) in the Mantine users community, totaling nearly 700 GitHub stars and 40K monthly npm downloads.

Meanwhile, during the summer of 2023, Mantine V7 came up as a major release with lots of breaking changes and a totally new styling approach based on native CSS instead of emotion/CSS-in-JS.

Which meant people in the users community became anxious and started pressing for a new version of Mantine DataTable to work with.

I'm sure some of you know this already: writing and maintaining open-source is hard. Sometimes harder than building commercial software. Comes with a lot of pressure, because a lot of the stuff we use today, including our phones, relies on open-source, and monetizing this kind of work is not exactly trivial or straightforward.

In the current case, according to my calculations - less than 25% of the effort behind the upgrade process was financially compensated one way or the other. That's without even taking into consideration the entire 13 months long project lifespan prior to that.

I've been around a while, so I know that all open-source creators face similar issues. I also know it from my own experience. Mantine DataTable is one of my dearest open-source projects, but not the only one. I'm also the guy behind Mantine ContextMenu, tRPC-SvelteKit, PocketBaseUML, Expose-WSL, IISExpress-Proxy and a few others, not to mention the contributions I'm constantly making to other people's or organizations' repos. Yet I'm still struggling with raising enough funds to be able to dedicate as much time as I'd like to the project, despite the fact that my projects are being used by lots of startups and developers worldwide.

Please understand that I'm not complaining, but merely pointing out the facts. While I don't do it primarily for money, I need money to support my existence, as everyone else does.

I'll do my best to keep maintaining the package, come up with new features and fixing bugs as they emerge, but I can't do it without your support.

So. I need your help. A couple of companies backing up the project on a monthly basis, or one company that uses the component and hires my services would do wonders for the future of the project on the longer term.