LakeDrops Drupal Consulting, Development and Hosting: Eight Posts on the Fun Part. One on the Bill.

In Post 8 I described my monthly billing run. One client never gets an invoice: the Drupal community, which has had almost all of my working time since July 2025. This post is that invoice. The eight posts before it showed the fun part: the Modeler API, the Workflow Modeler, test and replay, the ECA Guide, orchestration. This one shows the ledger underneath: 87 actively maintained drupal.org projects, the Gin admin theme, the Admin theme subsystem in core, 293 public projects on the LakeDrops GitLab, a calendar of weekly and monthly community meetings, two DrupalCons a year. Innovation gets applause; maintenance gets a green badge. Every funding conversation so far was about a feature. Nobody has offered to sponsor a security release. Since July 2025 the revenue has been zero, paid for by earlier years. Dries' cost-allocation posts explain why. The menu at the end has prices: sponsor maintenance through Open Collective, a service agreement, hiring for ECA work, funding the next innovation. Total: roughly €10,000 a month.