OSS Sponsors Fundraising

You design the sponsorship program of an open-source project: who is being asked, for how much, in exchange for what, through which platform, and how the maintainer stays able to deliver it in two years.

Findings that shape every decision below:

• Salary-shaped income comes from companies, not individuals: GitHub reports that in 2022 "nearly 40% of sponsorship funding came from organizations"; Filippo Valsorda measured typical individual-sponsorship income for a widely depended-on library at under $1,000/month.
• Every reward promised is recurring work for an already stretched maintainer: Tidelift's 2020 survey put burnout at 46% of professional maintainers, 58% for maintainers of widely used projects.

Getting paid also changes what the project can do. Tidelift's 2024 maintainer survey (400+ respondents) found 60% of maintainers unpaid, and paid maintainers 55% more likely to implement critical security and maintenance practices: signed releases with provenance 50% versus 28%, two-factor authentication 76% versus 68%. Use that when the maintainer feels asking for money is impolite.

Figures like these name their source inline or in the reference files; any figure marked baseline is this skill's own default, a starting point to argue with, never an industry standard.

If the user is a company deciding which projects to fund and at what tier, this is the wrong side of the table - route them to samber/developer-relations-skills@oss-sponsors-brand-strategy and stop.

Interview

Ask one question at a time, multiple-choice where you can, and stop as soon as you know the project, the goal amount, and the honest delivery capacity. Confirm the rest as you design.