It's been a smooth experience so far. It "just worked" and the direct connection to my open source work is convenient and just feels right.
Ever since we removed all proprietary licensing around the Caddy web server a few weeks ago [1], I'll be relying more and more on sponsorships to continue its development full-time.
One thing I worry about is that this funding model only works for somewhat popular developers. You need to be well known to get people to donate to you monthly.
If you're a person that prefers to just do some work and not talk about it much, this kind of sponsorship model wont work.
To me, something like bountysource seems like an awesome model: people could all chip in to support a feature request or an issue, and anyone who is familiar enough with the subject matter can do the work.
(Unfortunately the reward mostly seemed way too little for the effort required -- it would be a nice bonus if you would do the work anyway, but I don't think you could make a living by implementing issues from bountysource)
> If you're a person that prefers to just do some work and not talk about it much, this kind of sponsorship model wont work.
Marketing is a fact of life, I think. Of course, there's good marketing (making people who might enjoy your product aware of it) and bad marketing (annoying people), but if you hope to reap the benefits of having your work in front of a lot of people, you do have to reach them.
> but if you hope to reap the benefits of having your work in front of a lot of people
What OP says, and you miss, is that some people are not interested in reaping benefits. They are interested in doing work.
They are constrained by time and money, so yes, sponsorship can help their projects, but they are not in it for the reaping. If anything they will be happy to see a lot of people reap benefits from their work, not the other way around.
How many are like that? I don’t know. Maybe not a lot, but some for sure.
You assume that everyone works on their own projects. In that case, yes, you should probably market it, if nobody knows about your project it doesn't matter.
I was more thinking about contributing to other projects. What incentive do I have for fixing an issue in someone elses repo?
With this sponsorship model, the benefits will only go to the dev whose name is on the repo.
It's going to be very hard to market yourself as the guy who fixes random issues in a bunch of unrelated projects.
Marketing yourself as someone who fixes bugs in unrelated projects is a noble cause. But the realities of oss are that you will likely get a fixed income job while some large corp will make loads more money off of your fixes and projects. I for one praise monetisation of open source and hope licensing will become more restrictive (i.e. if your company earns more than X$ then then you need to pay a license for it). Great engineering should be paid in freedom from 9 to 5 not just praise and contracts.
"Unfortunately, since it's opt-in it didn't move the needle at all. I think it directed a few hundred dollars to Sindre's Patreon. But that was it."
I am currently looking at TideLift to see if there that is a more viable option. But to your point, it might all be "way too little for the effort required".
In my opinion, it's essentially "gig economy" at scale. GitHub should start publishing raw data on how much money developers are getting... median etc and how close that maps to a developer salary etc
Your project being popular is enough. I had no idea who Andrew Kelly was but after reading Zig's documentation, trying it, and feeling like it satisfied what I want from a language of that style going forward, I started chipping in a bit each month.
It probably helped that I watched his video demos on YouTube and such and saw there was a person behind the project.
I'd imagine the project being something exciting or something that makes programming more fun helps a lot as well. An extremely useful but boring project probably won't inspire as many people to donate, even if that's not really fair.
I understand that when a software project has no formal institutional “home” (it’s new, or it’s small, or it’s beneficiaries are themselves “homeless”) - a community funded model can help maintain/develop things that benefit the community at large.
At the same time I don’t feel comfortable that funding is for a person not a project and I’m at unease with the tiers (and resulting reward) structure.
Got early access to it as well (not validated yet, Stripe's interface is really not user-friendly and asks for papers I don't usually have handy).
And yeah, I totally agree with you. I felt really weird writing the tiers. GitHub's wording seems like there shouldn't be any reward, so I didn't put any reward (and I don't really feel like pushing rewards anyway). But why do tiers then?
Perhaps it will help herding people into making it to higher tiers? I don't know, from my point of view, I'd prefer let people free.
As for person vs project, I don't really have the problem, though I agree with you. I feel like small projects won't setup this, because it feels much more complicated than doing a paypal (perhaps paypal got so cumbersome as well? it wasn't when i made an account there.), and big projects will need teams.
I have to mention that I also have an account at liberapay for donations, and they do handle teams! (they basically do a round-robin, so you need enough donaters)
Edit: Yup, Stripe is really annoying. They somehow denied my ID, without saying why, and I can't seem to link this account into liberapay.
I also got early access, and ended up signing up for a librepay account as well because I was curious to try it out. (Stripe setup went OK for me. Here's my project FWIW: https://github.com/luvsound/pippi)
I set up tiers, because they seem to encourage it, but they're all basically just early access to stuff that I'll make free anyway.
I work for a listener-sponsored radio station and I really think this model is pretty exciting -- keep access free for all and allow those with the means to support it financially. (And rewards I'm sure are good motivators for some.) It also means you aren't beholden to "the man", shareholders looking for profit, etc...
I work at Stripe. Sorry you ran into that. Could you email me at edwin@stripe.com and I can see why your ID was denied? (We've also been working on improving that flow. I'd love to hear more on how it could be more user-friendly.)
>At the same time I don’t feel comfortable that funding is for a person not a project
i'm guessing this was an intentional choice to head off controversies about how a project divies up their GitHub sponsorship money. If everybody understants that they are giving to specific people, that avoids a lot of potential drama.
I’m sure it’s intentional (this is a well-thought and well-executed feature). I also understand the logic.
I feel uncomfortable with it.
It creates patronage relationship between people and a) I personally do not want that kind of relationship and b) maybe I’m wrong (or stretching it a bit) but it feels like that’s not really the kind of relationship the tech industry needs more of.
It seems less...fun than Patreon? Although Patreon is less code-content-focused, so maybe GitHub Sponsors can hit that niche a bit better. (although I'm not sure the current Sponsor button on a GitHub repo is an effective CTA, and I haven't yet found a good balance between self-promotion of a Patreon/GitHub Sponsorship and the content itself).
Do you deliberately have it set up so that $200/month is the only option for sponsoring? People sponsoring you must choose a tier, and currently that's the only one you have available, so nobody can sponsor for any amount except that.
I was under the impression that it was like Patreon, e.g. people can donate whatever they want, and if they get to a goal, then that goal applies.
Looking at the backend for the Sponsorship, the copy for it is ambiguous (especially given how Patreon operates); the copy on the page itself is more clear.
Thanks to GitHub adding an API a few days ago for accessing your sponsors programmatically, I've updated my donation hub with the relevant info from GitHub:
I'd encourage anyone else who is relying on donations for their open source work to consider doing a similar process of income diversification. We don't want to have all of our eggs in one GitHub-sized basket. If anyone needs help setting up a fosspay instance like mine, please reach out.
I'm the author and maintainer of WebTorrent, StandardJS, and other packages. I joined GitHub Sponsors so I could spend more time maintaining the 100s of projects that I've written over the years and continue developing new projects.
I'm optimistic that the direct call-to-action on GitHub itself will yield much better results than fundraising methods that take place off of GitHub, such as Patreon.
I feel that open source funding should primarily come from companies and not individuals, though of course I'm very grateful to the individuals who support me. The biggest limitation of the current Sponsors implementation is that only individuals can become sponsors. Once there's support for organization sponsors, I expect to see lots more money flowing through the system.
This limitation is probably the most important thing for me. We need the ability for companies and large orgs to fund projects or GH orgs, not just individuals.
I setup my GH sponsors specifically to raise fund for the projects I work on, but because of the structure it is unclear and difficult for me to feel alright with putting my info on projects I work on with others.
GitHub seems to have done a pretty good job under Microsoft expanding to a larger portion of the open source development pipeline, between the package repository feature and the sponsorship platform here. So far I'm impressed.
I have Patreon set up already for a handful of people I support, but being able to just mash a button on a GitHub thing I care about is pretty awesome.
My biggest question: Can you sponsor projects, or just people? Because while often they may be one in the same, what if I want to support an org-managed project?
I know we need to sponsor more open source development but I worry removing the friction is going to turn open source dev into Youtube. Make the money easy to collect and the vultures will appear from simple "take any project, rename, repost, profit!" (the licenses allow this) to just people trying to find any and every possible way to get the money pointed at them.
Even before this particular feature I've seen projects that are effectively 20 lines of code of glued together libraries asking for donations like they actually did something worthy of donation. (maybe there is some 20 line project out there actually worthy of donation but the examples I've seen are arguably not special 20 lines).
I'll cross my fingers we get mostly positives and few negatives.
I tried Patreon for 3 years and got nowhere with it, the visibility and ubiquity of GitHub really helped.
Here are my tiers - I like that GitHub approach this as sponsoring a developer and not a specific project. All my OSS current and future work is covered by my Insider email Updates sent via the platform on: inlets, k3sup, K8s on RPi, OpenFaaS and OpenFaaS Cloud.
Now that it's live, despite being on it for a few weeks, i'm interested to see if folks use it. I've had support through some other places [1] [2], I guess this [3] is more integrated to github on the whole. While I'm optimistic, people are not in the habit of supporting projects, and if they are it's usually the largest projects. I included what people have contributed in the past for a pretty popular project (2k+ stars on github, about 500k-700k downloads on npm a month)
It looks like a minimalistic Patreon (intro + tiers + posts for the sponsors). While I like the clean design, it misses the motivating parts:
- Listing the number of sponsors (oh, other people support them too!)
- Goals.
Personally, I don't count to get any suitable income. At the same time, I hoped to get motivation - people caring about my projects enough to pay $2.
I ended up getting hundreds of likes on FB + LinkedIn, I got first nothing (it was disheartening) and then 2 sponsors (well, I am grateful to them).
Meanwhile, a few times I got invited for an open-source project thanks to my other open source project (now I am at CQT, Singapore invited to develop an open-source Quantum Game 2.0)!
So my question is: even within open-source, is crowdsponsoring a viable model?
I was approved a couple of weeks ago and encouraged people donating to Tildes to move over to using GitHub Sponsors (https://tild.es/it2), which has gone pretty well so far, with about half of my recurring donators using it now: https://github.com/sponsors/Deimos
As explained in the linked post, for anyone that can use GitHub Sponsors, it will be the best available method for receiving donations/support right now, since they're not charging any fees at all, which means the recipient gets about 10% more than they would through Patreon. The $5000 USD matching for the first year is also amazing for smaller projects like mine where that can represent a significant chunk of donations.
My only real complaint so far is that the contribution-matching excludes some supporters in unclear ways. It seems like GitHub doesn't want to match contributions from (some?) new GitHub accounts due to potential abuse, but that's a little annoying for projects like mine where the target audience isn't exclusively developers and some people will be signing up for GitHub solely to donate. There also isn't any indication on my end for which contributions are being matched or not, so it's not possible to figure out exactly what my current monthly income from GitHub is.
It's not a big deal overall since it's still the best donation method even without matching, but it would be nice if they could try to make the fraud checks based on conditions outside of the GitHub account, like making sure that the accounts aren't using the same credit card as other contributors. It's been a little disappointing for some of my users to see that their contributions won't be matched.
I have some other minor complaints about a few aspects (e.g. forced tiers), but the main other issue is that everything is tied to individuals vs. organizations. There's no way to sponsor an organization/project, or sponsor as an organization. It sounds like they're working on that though, so hopefully that will be available before too long.
Looked at it a while ago and decided not to. People occasionally ask if I take donations, but never have. While I could change my mind in the future, today my code is a contribution to the community.
It's not trivial to just support all countries from day one. GitHub has never done marketplace-style payments (individual to individual) before. When you're dealing with money, it's best to take a measured approach. I'm actually super impressed with how fast the team has been rolling out support for new countries.
I didn't claim it's trivial or not. The message itself is confusing. There are 3 concerns here: beta, Stripe, countries and it's no clear how they inter-relate from the blog posts. As far as I can tell now, no-beta==Stripe Countries, beta==non-Stripe-Countries and other payment options like wire transfer have no weight.
GitHub Sponsors is out of beta for developers with a bank account in any of the 30 countries supported by Stripe.
For folks with bank accounts outside of that list, GitHub Sponsors is still in beta, we're accepting applications, and we’ll continue to roll out general availability to those countries in the coming months.
It's not obvious that somehow out of beta means mandatory Stripe Connect and no wire transfer. Although I assume that perhaps you use Stripe for wire transfers too?
We do support ACH transfer and wire transfer (as noted in the documentation) for developers with bank accounts in countries that are still in the limited beta. In the coming months, we'll be expanding general availability for more countries on a rolling basis. I'll look into clarifying that in the help docs too.
Is there a list of developers who are approved to accept sponsors on Github?
For certain projects, I already follow the people running them and became a sponsor when I got to know about them being on-boarded to the program (eg: cUrl).
It would help if I could see a list of all users accepting donations and figure out if I use any of their creations in my day to day work.
> "Donation for donation" schemes or other attempts to game the GitHub Sponsors Matching Fund are a violation of this policy and the GitHub Sponsors Additional Terms, and any funds matched during this period will be revoked.
It's been a smooth experience so far. It "just worked" and the direct connection to my open source work is convenient and just feels right.
Ever since we removed all proprietary licensing around the Caddy web server a few weeks ago [1], I'll be relying more and more on sponsorships to continue its development full-time.
So, this feature came at a great time.
[1]: https://github.com/caddyserver/caddy/issues/2786