Support Open-Source Projects and Maintainers as Organization with Github Sponsors

The world runs on open source. Everything that you see on the internet uses open-source programs in some way. A majority of web servers run on Linux or use Apache or Ngnix, which power around 60% of the world wide web. From a newbie developers to big-tech giants, everyone utilizes open-source software.

These programs are developed and maintained by an unsung army of unpaid heroes and are typically given away for free. Developers around the globe work effortlessly to make this happen. And many times, they remain unknown. They don't get enough credit for their work. Many of them work in their free time managing their full-time job and family. 

To celebrate their contribution, GitHub announced GitHub Sponsors in 2019.

What is GitHub sponsors?

GitHub Sponsors allows the developer community to financially support the people and organizations who design, build, and maintain the open-source projects they depend on directly on GitHub.

As an individual developer or an organization, you can sponsor open-source projects you use during your daily work or support. There are multiple sponsorship tiers and two modes of payments: one-time and monthly recurring payments. 

As an open-source contributor, you can enable GitHub sponsors in your account and accept sponsorships. You can optionally publish up to 10 one-time sponsorship tiers and ten monthly tiers for sponsors. Payments are made in US dollars. 

Over $33 million has been invested in open-source across 68 regions of the world since GitHub Sponsors was launched in 2019. On April 4, GitHub announced some changes to GitHub sponsors. Let's look at what they are in today's blog.

Organization-funded sponsorships

GitHub Sponsors were primarily available for individual developers. However, organizations are dependent on open-source more than individual contributors. And many organizations have shown interest in supporting projects and the maintainers their product depends on. 

With the new release, organizations can sponsor projects and their contributors directly from their organization accounts. Around 3,500 partner organizations showed interest in its beta version. As per GitHub, nearly 40% of sponsorship funding came from organizations, with each sponsorship worth an average of approx 15x more than individual sponsorships.

GitHub has introduced several new features to manage sponsorships easily:

• Added invoice payments
• Added a dashboard for budget insights for invoice customers
• Sponsorship history

Extra fees on organization-funded sponsorships

GitHub Sponsors has been free ever since it launched. 100% of the funds go to the project or contributor. But since the new release, GitHub has introduced fees into the program. 

Organizations must pay a certain amount of fee based on the payment method they use.

• Credit card users must pay a 6% fee. The 3% is the credit card processing fee, whereas the other 3% is the GitHub service processing fee.
• An organization must only pay a 3% GitHub service process fee if it pays by invoice. 

One important thing to note is that this applies only to organizations. Sponsorships funded by individual people remain free. 

Bulk sponsorships

It is possible to sponsor multiple projects at once. This is helpful for organizations sponsoring several projects/contributors. Bulk sponsorships are built into our GitHub Sponsors Explore page so that you have an easy way to get started with your sponsor-able dependencies at hand, and they're now exportable as a CSV, too.

Closing notes

Open-source software is the backbone of the internet and many products and services we use daily. GitHub Sponsors is a platform that enables the developer community to fund the projects and people they depend on. Organizations can sponsor projects and their contributors directly from their Github organization accounts. With the new features for organizations, you can now sponsor projects as a company and get matched by GitHub. This is a win-win situation for both the sponsors and the sponsored.