Can I pay someone to add a specific feature to an open source app?

You should consider how much programmer jobs pay per hour and commission someone at a similar rate. $20 is laughable, an insult even. I went to a comedy show last night and my partner couldn't go because she was ill. I offered her ticket to a guy who was asking at the start of the line. He offered $20. Fuck no. I paid a lot for these tickets. I'd rather it go to waste than you score some incredible deal on my back.

Up your expectations for what a person's time is worth.

As others mentioned, 20 bucks is probably a bit low, but if you have exactly in mind what you need and can write that up thoroughly in a way that can't be misunderstood, one of the folks from India or Pakistan on fiverr.com could probably do it for fairly cheap, assuming it's not a major rewrite but really just a quick enhancement.

Yeah but you're gonna need a lot more than $20.

Developers usually make $50-300/hour. Some features require 8-2000 hours to develop.

So do the math and offer a realistic bounty to pay the dev for their time, and they'll probably do it.

20 bucks is definitely not the amount you'd likely need to offer. Though if you're talking to current project maintainers you might be able to contribute that towards a feature bounty.

Picking a random dev off the street and asking them to contribute to a code base they've never seen before is going to be a multi-day ask at minimum and, if you're looking to actually attract someone with money that'll be a few hundred dollars minimum.

There are usually kofis or similar for projects you can contribute to and you can always create or upvote a ticket to create the feature.

https://github.com/jarnedemeulemeester/findroid

This is the repository? They have a ko-fi link in the repository meaning they accept donations to support the development. Have you tried contacting the lead developer of the project and asking if they would be interested in adding the feature you want if you sponsored it via a donation?

You can definitely do it but 20$ is outrageously low. Some projects do allow you to put a bounty on feature requests. But the feature you're asking sounds non-trivial. The work to implement it includes getting familiar with the project, coding the feature, testing it, writing automated tests, updating documentation, opening the pull request for review and making changes requested by the maintained during review. You're looking at several hours/days of work. 20$ for this amount of work is a small tip.

Some larger projects have what's called a feature bounty, like others have mentioned $20 is very low for someone not familiar with the codebase to do it, it might be enough for someone already familiar with it (but I seriously doubt it since it involves at least some refactoring of the UI to add a shuffle button). However if more people want that feature they can each contribute a small amount and eventually it would be a value that would justify someone to learn the codebase.

That being said, like someone else pointed out, it seems the app is going through some rewriting, so I wouldn't expect any new features (especially those involving UI) anytime soon.

Finally there are two issues mentioning shuffle in the GitHub, https://github.com/jarnedemeulemeester/findroid/issues/334 and https://github.com/jarnedemeulemeester/findroid/issues/547 you might want to create an account there and voice your wanting of that feature too, by either adding a thumbs up or a comment explaining why this is important to you.

Good luck, hope you get your shuffle play!

Edit: forgot to answer your question directly, yes, you can pay someone to contribute to an open source project, nothing wrong about that. But as a general rule it would be cheaper to give money to the people who are already working on the project.

I have done that two times on Upwork, one time I got a really great experience and other time was a waste of money.

In case of the good experience, the code got merged to the project and everyone was happy.

Just open an issue on the github suggesting the feature. You can also make a ko-fi donation as someone suggested. Doing something like that as straight-up paid work is legit, but it would cost a heck of a lot more than $20, as everyone has already said.

I read a study one time about lawyers who were more likely to offer pro bono work than to do a job when paid lower than their going rate.

You should first just ask the developer(s) of the software if they’ll add the feature. They could say yes.

Unless you live in a country where you are not allowed to write code or to pay other people, I don't see why you couldn't pay someone to do something that is not illegal in your stead

I wouldn’t accept $20 to do that.

You’re basically offering someone $20 to figure out the assembly line, break apart an assembly line, and build a new machine that works within the assembly line.

That’s not a $20 job

You're missing a zero or two on that offer amount of you want someone who actually knows what they're doing to even consider doing it.

Try your luck searching for someone on https://www.fiverr.com/

Just a heads up it looks like the dev is doing a major overhaul to the project and might reject the pull request to merge the change.

https://github.com/jarnedemeulemeester/findroid

Findroid is currently being rewritten to Jetpack Compose. 

Because of this, the main branch may be unusable for some time. 

Also, please refrain from creating pull requests which involve the old Views based UI.

if it's open source, you can definitely have someone copy that code, make the change you want and use that modified version.

if you wish to redistribute the modified version, some rules will apply depending on the type of licensing of the original program.

if you wish your changes to be integrated to the "official" version of the program, that's a bit more difficult, as this change would have to be accepted by the owner of the code repository, it needs to fit the code quality, planned features implementation, pass the tests, and that people involved have time for and interest in your changes.

For an open source project you are welcome to fork it (make a copy for yourself) and modify it however you like. The changes will be only on your fork.

You can also request that the original project pull your changes, in which case it would be available to everyone using it.

Yeah you can if the license doesn't expressly forbid modification, a FOSS program you can fork, pay someone to hack in a feature and build a modified version for you. If someone is familiar with it and it would be a quick edit and build you might be able to get it done for under 50CAD. If not then it will be a couple hundred dollars of work at least.

Just remember to follow the requirements of the program license. If it requires that you make the source also available than just add the modified files to a public git repo somewhere.

You can not force others to change their copy but you can change your own copy or have someone do it for you.

You could pay me $20.
I won't do it just cuz i don't know how, but i also don't have $20.