Awesome OSS Funding

A curated list of awesome resources for funding open source projects and authors.

Contents

• Products
• Donations
• Bounties
• Licensing
• Articles
• Organizations
• Related

Products

• Saasify - Provides monetized APIs on top of OSS projects.
• CodeFund - Provides funding for makers via ethical ads.
• Tidelift - Provides subscriptions connecting businesses with OSS devs.
• FOSSA - Open source management for enterprise teams.
• Gitcoin - Crowdfunding and freelance devs for your software projects.
• Back Your Stack - Discover your dependencies and financially support them.
• Scarf - Provides monetized CLIs for OSS projects.
• xs:code - Paid subscriptions for OSS projects.

Donations

• GitHub Sponsors - Recurring donations for GitHub developers and organizations.
• Patreon - Membership and recurring donations for independent creators.
• Open Collective - Open communities with full financial transparency.
• Buy me a coffee - Donations and relationship building for independent creators.
• Salt - Crowdfunding to help devs earn a monthly salary from OSS.
• Liberapay - Recurring donations for OSS projects.
• Flattr - Monthly subscription for donating to OSS projects.
• thanks - Give thanks to the open source maintainers you depend on.
• Ko-fi - Single and recurring donations for your projects without platform fees.

Bounties

• Issuehunt - Issue-based crowd sourcing/funding for OSS projects.
• Bountysource - Bounty-based funding for OSS projects.

Licensing

• License Zero - For-profit licenses for OSS projects.

Articles

• Lemonade Stand - The de facto living survey of different approaches for funding OSS.
• Getting paid for OSS - A solid guide for traditional means of funding OSS.
• Why funding open source is hard - Awesome read by Eric Berry.
• How to keep the lights on at Codefund - Excellent analysis of different approaches to OSS funding by Eric Berry.
• Fighting for open source sustainability
• Funding experiment recap - Great breakdown and insights by Feross.
• Should OSS advertise?
• Open core vs SaaS
• The internet relies on people working for free
• Open Core Summit Intro
• Commercializing open source - By a16z.
• What comes after open source? - By a16z.
• Passion Economy - By a16z.
• What is subscription based open source?
• Open core definition and tradeoffs
• COSS business models
• Creating OSS value != Capturing OSS value
• The broken economics of OSS
• The OSS model is under siege
• The world runs on open-source, but who’s paying for gas?

Organizations

• Sustain OSS - Organization focused on making OSS more sustainable.
• COSS Media - Resources to help Commercial OSS (COSS) founders build lasting companies.
• Open Core Summit - Focused on connecting the world's Commercial OSS (COSS) companies.

Related

• Awesome Software Patreons