Open-source maintainers still work underfunded as sponsorship crosses $100 million

A maintainer patches a library late at night that ships inside thousands of products, and no invoice follows. Sebastián Ramírez and Caleb Porzio spent years in that position. Ramírez, known as tiangolo, builds tools that other Python projects depend on. Porzio built Livewire and Alpine.js, tools thousands of web developers reach for.

That gap carries a cost. Critical projects lose their maintainers to salaried jobs elsewhere, security fixes slow down, and the software supply chain that companies ship on grows brittle. A company that loses track of its dependencies discovers too late when one of them loses its last active maintainer. Maintainer burnout ranks among the biggest risks to that supply chain, and most of the people holding it up have little money behind them.

GitHub Sponsors has now moved more than $100 million to open source maintainers and projects.

GitHub opened Sponsors in 2019 so any developer could pay the maintainers they leaned on. Tens of thousands of individuals and companies signed up in the years that followed, and the belief behind the program spread.

The program supports over 70,000 maintainers and organizations. Its sponsor base has grown past a quarter of a million, spanning individual developers to Fortune 500 companies.

The money is arriving faster. The first tranche of funding took nearly two years to gather. The latest stretch of the same size took five months.

Organizations write the bigger checks

The program started with individual developers. Companies now supply much of the weight. Organizations account for nearly 40% of sponsorship funding, and that share keeps growing.

Each organization-funded sponsorship runs nearly 15 times the average individual one. A single company’s check can outweigh a crowd of individual sponsors.

Organization-funded sponsorships became generally available a few years back, and Shopify began funding its dependencies at scale. Companies like Shopify pay because their platforms run on open source, from foundational technologies to small tools that smooth daily work. The program later reached more than a hundred regions, partnered with Patreon, and added bulk sponsorships and invoice payments. “For us, sponsorship is both practical and values-driven: it helps sustain the software we rely on while strengthening our connection to the people building it,” Shopify said.

GitHub found a consistent pattern across the years of running the program. Lower the barrier to sponsoring, and funding rises. Invoice payments, added regions, and bulk sponsorships each brought more money in.

The checks changed careers

Caleb Porzio credits the program with a career change. “Sponsorships allowed me to quit my job and work on them full time,” he said. Kelvin Tegelaar of Lime Networks said it “gave me a direct, sustainable way to fund the time” his projects take.

Sebastián Ramírez routes some of his sponsorship money back out. He said it “allowed me to sub-sponsor many of the open source tools that power mine.”

Mercedes-Benz Tech Innovation funds maintainers through it as well. Dr. Wolfgang Gehring, the company’s open source lead, ties that support to the health and longevity of the projects its engineering teams rely on. His employer ships cars built on software that runs on open source underneath.

The gap is still enormous

The funding shortfall for open source stays large. The gap is enormous, with many critical projects still underfunded. Many run on evenings and weekends. Burnout keeps pulling maintainers away from the code that companies depend on, and the demand to fund that work sits ahead of the supply.

The money can be found. The projects that need it sit on GitHub’s Sponsors Explore page, next to the companies that already ship their code.