If you mostly use chat AI and you're starting to follow developer creators, this is the kind of number combo that can send you in the wrong direction. You scroll past a big account, almost keep scrolling, then wonder if you're missing the real play. You see a huge audience and assume the sponsor page is the business. That mistake can waste time, budget, and attention.
Matt Pocock is a clean counterexample. Publicly, he has 30.2k GitHub followers and 9 current sponsors. Publicly, the clearer price tags sit outside the sponsor page: a $200 course and a $500 bundle. That is the point. Sponsor is a trust badge, not the cash register. [C002]
The useful read here is sponsors / mattpocock [C001]. Not "how much does he really make?" We do not know that from public pages. The visible lesson is narrower and more useful: attention builds trust first, and trust opens the door to paid products.
That is also why this is worth sharing. Don't judge an update by how many features it lists. Judge it by whether it changes your next decision. A big following plus a small sponsor count is not a contradiction if the sponsor page is doing signaling work and the real checkout sits somewhere else.
So if you're a solo builder, the next move is not "turn on Sponsors and wait." Build the trust signal, then make the paid offer obvious. Boundary: this read uses only public GitHub and public product-page information, not private revenue data or off-platform deals. If you know someone copying surface metrics instead of business mechanics, share this with them.