Hi, my name is Kent, and I want to be real with you, so here we go.
Mission
My mission is to make the world a better place with quality software. I do this best by teaching others how to create quality software and hope they use what they learn to make their corner of the world a better place. So far this has gone very well. Many people have expressed to me that as a result of my teaching they've gotten jobs, pay raises, and increased productivity.
Employment
I am self-employed (Kent C. Dodds Tech LLC).
Passive Income
My "Kent C. Dodds Tech LLC" company is profitable. Because of this success, I'm able to push my mission forward even better by offering a great deal of my time and knowledge for free in the form of open source, podcasts (1, 2, 3, 4, 5), my blog, my YouTube channel, my Discord community, etc... However, for my business to be sustainable, I do have several ways that people give me money:
I have a handful of sources of income:
| Source | Description | Who pays |
|---|---|---|
| EpicWeb.dev | A collaborative effort to teach people Full Stack web development. It's packed full of knowledge, some of which is open source. I sell lifetime licenses to access the 450+ videos. | Engineers and their employers |
| EpicReact.dev | A collaborative effort to teach people React. It's packed full of knowledge, some of which is open source. I sell lifetime licenses to access the 350+ videos. | Engineers and their employers |
| TestingJavaScript.com | Similar to EpicReact, but for Testing. | Engineers and their employers |
| Egghead.io | I'm one of many instructors on this platform. I have hundreds of videos teaching JavaScript, React, Testing, and more (though it's not nearly as comprehensive as EpicReact or TestingJavaScript). Many are free to access. Many are paid courses. Egghead charges for a yearly subscription and I get paid based on how long people spend watching my videos relative to other's videos. I also get a bonus when people subscribe with my affiliation links. | Engineers and their employers |
| Live Workshops | I sell individual tickets to workshops in collaboration with conferences or other partners. Sometimes I will sell an entire workshop or series of workshops to businesses for their engineers. | Engineers and their employers |
| Frontend Masters | Very similar to Egghead. | Engineers and their employers |
| Consulting | Occasionally someone will grab an hour of my paid time. | Engineers and their employers |
| Amazon Associates | All amazon links you find on my website have my Amazon Affiliate code attached to them and I get a tiny bit of money from that. | Amazon |
| Fathom affiliates | My analytics resource is Fathom and they're amazing. When people sign up with my link I get a little money from that. | Fathom |
These are sorted (roughly) by the percentage of my income they contribute to. The majority of my income is from EpicWeb.dev, EpicReact.dev, and TestingJavaScript.com.
Free Stuff
I'm the guinea pig for some products and sometimes they give me credits or free service in exchange for my feedback. Including:
Investments
My primary investments are in the stock market, bonds, and real estate. My single biggest stock holding is Tesla and similar companies involved in the electric mobility disruption. I also have money in ARK Invest's Genomics ETF. Otherwise my stock investments are diversified and managed for me. I'm a long-term investor, not a gambler.
Oh, and I do not own Onewheel stock. I just love my onewheel so much so I tweet about it a lot. Same goes for Remix.
Expenses
Mostly it's stuff like taxes, health insurance, office equipment, business-related travel, hosting costs, collaboration profit sharing, charity donations, Sponsoring other engineers on GitHub, and supporting software companies like Codesandbox. The rest comes to me personally to support my wife, four kids, and our dog and also to invest in our sustainability goals.
Sustainability
I'm doing my best to improve the climate sustainability of my company (as every company should) by investing in sustainable energy generation and transport. My eventual goal is to be carbon negative. I drive only electric cars and produce more electricity than I use with my home solar and battery system.
Privacy
I collect user first names and email addresses. These are stored in my own database (which only I have access to) and ConvertKit. I also track the blog posts that you have read to give you good recommendations. This data is not viewable by anyone other than myself. If you connect your discord account to your KCD account, then I store that discord ID, but I don't store any access token.
When you read a blog post, I keep track of that. The gamified function of the
website will notify people on discord when your read results in your team taking
the leader spot for the post or the blog overall. It'll @mention you (if
you've connected to discord) or say your name. If you'd like to opt-out of being
mentioned, email me.
I do have analytics. I use Fathom for "website analytics without compromise." And Fathom has this really awesome feature that allows you to make the analytics public, so feel free to check out the analytics for this website for yourself!
I also have metrics for performance monitoring. I use Sentry. You'll notice requests sending metrics in the Network tab of your browser's devtools. Check out the request that's made and you'll notice there's no user information sent.
I do not have access to user accounts on any of my course platforms (including EpicReact.dev and TestingJavaScript.com). kentcdodds.com is the only property in scope for this privacy policy. I will never ever ever sell kentcdodds.com user information.
Oh, and everything on this site is open source so if you're curious, you can find out for yourself what I do with your data.
Terms
Everything on kentcdodds.com is provided free of charge and therefore there is no promise this will continue. I'll do my best to keep things going and preserve your data, but that's a plan, not a promise.
How you can support me best
I appreciate that you're even reading this section, so that's nice support in itself 💖. If you want to financially support me, then buying any of my courses is the best way to both support me and get something out of it yourself. If that's what you want, then you could also send me a one-time tip to PayPal.me/kcdtech.
Conclusion
I hope this transparency page gives you an idea of what my incentives are and if you're one of the terrific people who benefit from my free stuff I hope you use that to make your corner of the world a better place. If you're one of the people helping me keep this sustainable by giving me money in one way or another then I thank you all the more.
Please keep in mind that even when financial incentives are at play, I try my best to be a self aware, authentic, and genuine person. Please assume enthusiasm you see from me about a particular topic is genuine even if there is a bit of a financial incentive. In every case, the enthusiasm showed up before the financial incentive.
Take care!