$100 million for open source: A milestone built by the community

We launched GitHub Sponsors in 2019 with a simple belief: the people who build and maintain open source software deserve to be supported for their work. Since then, tens of thousands of sponsors—individuals and organizations alike—have turned that belief into action. We’re proud to announce that more than $100 million has been invested in open source maintainers and projects through GitHub Sponsors. This milestone belongs to the developers, organizations, and maintainers who have invested in a more sustainable open source ecosystem, and it signals that the way we value open source is changing. How we got here GitHub Sponsors started with individuals. We wanted to make it possible for any developer to directly support the maintainers they depend on. In 2023, we made organization-funded sponsorships generally available and saw organizations like Shopify step up to fund their dependencies at scale. The program expanded to 103 regions, partnered with Patreon, and introduced tools like bulk sponsorships and invoice payments to make it easy to participate. The result: a global funding network that supports over 70,000 maintainers and organizations, and includes more than 280,000 sponsors spanning individual developers to Fortune 500 companies. The pace is accelerating, too. The first $10 million took nearly two years. The most recent $10 million took just five months. The people behind the number While $100 million is a meaningful number, the real measure of impact is what it’s made possible for real people. GitHub Sponsors changed how I think about open source. It gave me a direct, sustainable way to fund the time it takes to build and maintain projects, instead of treating it like side work. That has let me invest more consistently in the projects and build with a much longer-term view. Thanks to GitHub Sponsors, I am able to give back to our community, build a business, and actually make a difference in OSS. Kelvin Tegelaar, Maintainer, Lime Networks Shopify invests in