GitHub Sponsors opens to organization funding
GitHub is moving its Sponsors program beyond individual contributions. Organization-funded sponsorships are now generally available, letting companies directly fund the open source projects and maintainers they depend on. The company also introduced a fee structure for corporate sponsorships and a bulk sponsorship tool for funding multiple projects at once.
Since the program launched in 2019, more than $33 million has been invested in open source across 68 regions. In 2022, organizations accounted for nearly 40% of all sponsorship funding, with the average organization-funded sponsorship worth roughly 15 times more than an individual one. More than 3,500 organizations including AWS, American Express, Shopify, and Mercedes Benz participated during the beta period.
Crucial parts of the open source infrastructure are maintained by a few hardworking individuals that often do it for free. Mercedes-Benz and many others use this code. Heartbleed and Log4Shell affected tools, for example, are used by a huge number of people and enterprises. It should be in the interest of all of us that we can rely on foundational tools. That’s the reason why Mercedes-Benz supports the work of these people.
To reduce friction for corporate sponsors, GitHub has rolled out invoice payments, a budget dashboard for invoice customers, and sponsorship history tracking. Those features are now available to all organizations.
New fees apply to organization sponsorships
GitHub Sponsors has been fee-free since launch, but the company signaled at the outset that fees would eventually come. That day is now here for corporate funders. Beginning today, fees apply to all new organization-funded sponsorships, with the rate depending on the payment method:
- Credit card payments carry a 6% fee, split evenly between a 3% credit card processing charge and a 3% GitHub service fee.
- Invoice payments carry only the 3% GitHub service fee.
Existing recurring credit card sponsorships will see the fees applied starting June 1, 2023. For current invoice-based sponsorships, fees will not apply until the existing beta agreement expires. Individual sponsorships remain entirely fee-free.
GitHub Sponsors provided me with a ton of early validation for tldraw. I might not have even tried to build a startup around tldraw without that validation—and I doubt it would have worked without the mix of individual and corporate sponsors backing up my pitch. The program gave me a great reason to create content and community around tldraw. I’ve been very public about who is sponsoring me so it’s been a way for my sponsors to grow their communities too.
Bulk sponsorships for wide-scale dependency funding
Organizations often rely on hundreds of open source projects, making individual sponsorship workflows impractical. GitHub has now built bulk sponsorship capabilities directly into the GitHub Sponsors Explore page. This lets organizations identify their sponsorable dependencies and fund many of them in one pass. The list of dependencies is also exportable as a CSV for further analysis.
The feature mirrors what GitHub itself did last year when it sponsored over 900 of its own open source dependencies at once. That internal tooling is now available to all organizations.
While these announcements focus largely on payment mechanics, GitHub says it is also working on ways for maintainers to better manage their sponsorships and control how they show sponsor visibility. The company is gathering feedback through its Community Discussions repository as it continues developing the program.
