Sustainability Pillar
Funding for Open Source Projects
Funding is usually the first sustainability layer for an open source project. This page groups the catalogue into the four funding models that matter most in practice: recurring support, campaign funding, grants, and bounties.
If you are unsure where to start, begin with Donations for ongoing supporter revenue, Grants for ecosystem and foundation funding, or Bounties when you need to pay for specific issues and deliverables. Popular starting points include GitHub Sponsors, Open Collective, and Gitcoin.
25
Donations
17
Crowdfunding
8
Grants
24
Bounties
Funding subtype
Donations
Recurring or one-off support from individuals, companies, and communities.
When to use it: Start here when your project already has users who want to support ongoing maintenance.
Amazon Smile
Amazon donates 0.5% of the eligible net purchase price to the charitable organisation of choice, such as OSS foundations.
Beerpay
Allows simple funding development of existing or new features for Github based projects using Chrome extension.
Buy me Coffee
Allows creators to receive support and share premium content with a link or a button on their website.
Flattr
Supports multiple online creators with one single subscription or with one-time donations
Flossbank
Funds entire dependency tree’s as they’re used with a combination of donation and ad revenue.
FOSS Pay
A self hosted Python and PostgreSQL based donation collection platform for groups and individuals.
Fountain
A predictable fundraising, income streams, surplus redistribution, and sustainable growth to open source and public goods.
GitHub Sponsors
Allows the developer community to financially support the people who design, build, and maintain the open source projects they depend on, directly on GitHub.
Hopsie
Allows fundraising through donation campaigns and follow up with marketing campaigns.
Houdini
Houdini is an all-in-one, self-hosted, open source fundraising software developed in Ruby on Rails.
Kauri
A decentralized technical knowledge base for the Ethereum ecosystem by incentivising creators and the community.
Ko-fi
A friendly way to ask fans to support your work for the price of a coffee.
Liberapay
Liberapay is a recurrent donations platform where people who benefit from free work support creators.
LibreSelery
Continuous and automated donation distribution to your project contributors and dependencies. Integrated into Github Actions
Open Collective
Provides tools for collectives to receive money and mechanisms to spend their money in a transparent way.
Open Gift
Allows open source consumers to send requests for implementations to the open source project teams.
Patreon
Empowers membership businesses for creators through regular donations.
Radicle
A peer-to-peer decentralized stack for building and sustaining open source software together
Shukran
Enables creators get earnings through tips from people who enjoy their creative work regardless of audience size or algorithm.
Software Freedom Conservancy
A not-for-profit charity that helps promote, improve, develop, and defend FLOSS projects.
Software in the Public Interest
A non-profit organization to help organizations develop and distribute open hardware and software.
SourceCred
A tool for attributing credit to contributions based on metrics that describes how important they were.
StackAid
Distributes your subscription fee among your projects’ direct and indirect dependencies based on your project configuration.
Thanks
A tool that helps you see if any of the software you depend on has authors seeking for donations
Tipeee
Tipeee is a financing platform for Internet content creators allowing them to receive tips from their communities.
Funding subtype
Crowdfunding
Campaign-style funding for a roadmap, release, or community-backed milestone.
When to use it: Use this when you have a clear goal, a launch narrative, and a time-bound funding target.
Commit Change
A hosted fundraising platform (based on Houdini listed below) for people at all technical skill levels with possibility to get assistance from the support team too.
Commons Stack
Commons-based microeconomies to sustain public goods through a library of open-source decentralized components.
Community Bridge
A Linux Foundation project to help advance sustainability, security, and diversity in open source technology by enabling developers to raise and spend funding.
Dev Protocol
Dev protocol is a decentralized middleware that enhances individual activities and supports sustainability through staking.
FairOSS
FairOSS is a public benefit corporation with a mission to sustain the production and maintenance of freely shareable intellectual property.
Fundition
Fundition is a decentralized, peer-to-peer crowdfunding and collaboration platform, built on the Steem blockchain.
Goteo
A collective financing and distributed collaboration platform for projects for giving individual rewards, and generating collective returns.
Hit Chain
A developer autonomous community that bring together developers, investors and IT experts.
Indiegogo
A crowdfunding and on demand campaigning platform with marketplace.
Kickstarter
Kickstarter helps artists, designers, and other creators find the resources and support they need to make their ideas a reality.
NouGit
NouGit is an open source development accelarator platform with market place and social networking features combined.
Open Source Coin
A decentralized network run by the community and contributors, with a sustainable economy and value redistribution.
Permissionless Software Foundation
Permissionless Software Foundation is decentralized autonomous organization with the purpose to foster the growth of open source software.
Pledgecamp
Pledgecamp is a decentralized ecosystem for crowdfunding with blockchain protected investments.
Repo.trade
Launch a tradable repo token in one click and earn passive income from trading fees.
Snowdrift
A nonprofit cooperative for funding public goods – things like software, music, journalism, and research.
Utopian
A provider of free crowdsourcing services to open source projects by incentivizing contribution.
Funding subtype
Grants
Non-dilutive funding from foundations, programs, and ecosystem sponsors.
When to use it: Best for infrastructure, public goods, research, or ecosystem work with strategic value.
Core Infrastructure Initiative
A Linux Foundation initiative to collaboratively identify, fund and support critical elements of the global information infrastructure that are in need of assistance.
Free and Open Source Software Audit
FOSSA helps improve the overall security of the Internet through activities such as bug bounties, hackathons, and having it sponsored by EU budget.
Google Summer of Code
Google Summer of Code connects student developers with open source projects to work on a 10 week programming project during their break from school.
NLnet
Financially supporting organizations and people that contribute to an open information society with ideas to fix the internet since 1997.
NumFOCUS
NumFOCUS provides funding and resources for open source scientific computing projects.
Open Source Security Foundation
A Linux Foundation initiative to provide a forum for a collaborative, cross-industry effort for ensuring open source security.
Season of Docs
A stipend program by Google that bring open source projects and technical writers together, to the benefit of both.
Sovereign Tech Fund
The Sovereign Tech Fund supports the development, improvement and maintenance of open digital infrastructure.
Funding subtype
Bounties
Outcome-based payments tied to specific issues, features, and security fixes.
When to use it: Use this when you need targeted contributions rather than general recurring support.
Algora
Algora is a developer tool & community simplifying bounties, hiring & open source sustainability.
BEPRO Network
Bepro is a task-based marketplace created to help organizations and builders thrive.
Blocklancer
Blocklancer is a freelancing platform on the Blockchain that enables the cooperation between the freelancer and the clients.
Bounties Network
Decentralized task based bounty platform with Ethereum based staking and arbitration.
Bountify
Bountify is a marketplace for bounties on solutions to coding problems and tough tech questions.
Bounty Source
Bountysource is the funding platform for open-source software by creating/collecting bounties and pledging to fundraisers.
BountyHub
BountyHub is a platform where developers can put bounties on their Github issues or earn money by solving them.
Bugmark
A platform, used to conduct research into the use of incentives and prediction markets and tooling for open-source projects.
Coinlancer
Allows freelancers and clients connect remotely through smart contracts and exchange digital services for monetary value.
Fiverr
Fiverr is an online marketplace for freelance to offer digital services to customers worldwide.
Fund Request
A decentralised marketplace for requesting development bug fixes, security audits, etc to the Open Source developer community.
Gitcoin
Gitcoin is the easiest way to leverage the open source community to incentivize or monetize work.
Gitpay
An issue bounty platform for Git-powered projects with an integrated payment system.
Giveth
Decentralized transparent not-for-profit donation platform supporting open source projects with Ethereum donations.
Hacken Proof
A decentralized bug bounty platform for cybersecurity and cooperation between ethical hackers and customers.
HackerOne
HackerOne is a vulnerability coordination and bug bounty platform that connects businesses with penetration testers and cybersecurity researchers.
Issue Hunt
Allows open source project owners to fund Github issues and developers to hunt the issues.
IT Sphere
We bring together digital products developers, outsource developers, investors and IT experts.
Katalyse
Allows project creators to raise funds and kickstart their projects. The focus of the platform is moving into launching and listing ICOs.
Open Source Design
A community of designers and developers pushing open design processes and improving design of open source software.
Opire
Opire is a bounty platform where anyone can put bounties on any GitHub issue, which are only paid out once resolved.
Pond
Earn rewards for completing bounties in a high-quality, impactful manner.
Status
Blockchain and crypto focused bounties platform.
Upwork
Upwork connects businesses of all sizes to freelancers, independent professionals, and agencies for all their hiring needs.