
GitHub Sponsors is now out of beta in 30 countries - AlexITC
https://github.blog/2019-11-04-github-sponsors-is-now-out-of-beta-in-30-countries/
======
mholt
Awesome. I was approved 5 days ago:
[https://github.com/sponsors/mholt](https://github.com/sponsors/mholt)

It's been a smooth experience so far. It "just worked" and the direct
connection to my open source work is convenient and just feels right.

Ever since we removed all proprietary licensing around the Caddy web server a
few weeks ago [1], I'll be relying more and more on sponsorships to continue
its development full-time.

So, this feature came at a great time.

[1]:
[https://github.com/caddyserver/caddy/issues/2786](https://github.com/caddyserver/caddy/issues/2786)

------
jakobegger
One thing I worry about is that this funding model only works for somewhat
popular developers. You need to be well known to get people to donate to you
monthly.

If you're a person that prefers to just do some work and not talk about it
much, this kind of sponsorship model wont work.

To me, something like bountysource seems like an awesome model: people could
all chip in to support a feature request or an issue, and anyone who is
familiar enough with the subject matter can do the work.

(Unfortunately the reward mostly seemed way too little for the effort required
-- it would be a nice bonus if you would do the work anyway, but I don't think
you could make a living by implementing issues from bountysource)

~~~
davidw
> If you're a person that prefers to just do some work and not talk about it
> much, this kind of sponsorship model wont work.

Marketing is a fact of life, I think. Of course, there's good marketing
(making people who might enjoy your product aware of it) and bad marketing
(annoying people), but if you hope to reap the benefits of having your work in
front of a lot of people, you do have to reach them.

~~~
ronilan
_> but if you hope to reap the benefits of having your work in front of a lot
of people_

What OP says, and you miss, is that some people are not interested in reaping
benefits. They are interested in doing work.

They are constrained by time and money, so yes, sponsorship can help their
projects, but they are not in it for the reaping. If anything they will be
happy to see a lot of people reap benefits from their work, not the other way
around.

How many are like that? I don’t know. Maybe not a lot, but some for sure.

~~~
davidw
Well OP seemed to be unhappy about not getting the benefits of having people
sponsor them with a model like this.

There are tons of people who like to just go do stuff, and that's great! But
if you don't promote it at all, certain avenues are not open to you.

------
ronilan
I got early access a couple of weeks ago.

That’s my profile:
[https://github.com/sponsors/ronilan](https://github.com/sponsors/ronilan)

I’m conflicted about the concept.

I understand that when a software project has no formal institutional “home”
(it’s new, or it’s small, or it’s beneficiaries are themselves “homeless”) - a
community funded model can help maintain/develop things that benefit the
community at large.

At the same time I don’t feel comfortable that funding is for a person not a
project and I’m at unease with the tiers (and resulting reward) structure.

~~~
phh
Got early access to it as well (not validated yet, Stripe's interface is
really not user-friendly and asks for papers I don't usually have handy).

And yeah, I totally agree with you. I felt really weird writing the tiers.
GitHub's wording seems like there shouldn't be any reward, so I didn't put any
reward (and I don't really feel like pushing rewards anyway). But why do tiers
then? Perhaps it will help herding people into making it to higher tiers? I
don't know, from my point of view, I'd prefer let people free.

As for person vs project, I don't really have the problem, though I agree with
you. I feel like small projects won't setup this, because it feels much more
complicated than doing a paypal (perhaps paypal got so cumbersome as well? it
wasn't when i made an account there.), and big projects will need teams.

I have to mention that I also have an account at liberapay for donations, and
they do handle teams! (they basically do a round-robin, so you need enough
donaters)

Edit: Yup, Stripe is really annoying. They somehow denied my ID, without
saying why, and I can't seem to link this account into liberapay.

~~~
erikschoster
I also got early access, and ended up signing up for a librepay account as
well because I was curious to try it out. (Stripe setup went OK for me. Here's
my project FWIW:
[https://github.com/luvsound/pippi](https://github.com/luvsound/pippi))

I set up tiers, because they seem to encourage it, but they're all basically
just early access to stuff that I'll make free anyway.

I work for a listener-sponsored radio station and I really think this model is
pretty exciting -- keep access free for all and allow those with the means to
support it financially. (And rewards I'm sure are good motivators for some.)
It also means you aren't beholden to "the man", shareholders looking for
profit, etc...

~~~
qmmmur
Cool project! This is something I've always been looking for. I'd love to
contribute.

------
minimaxir
I did get early access to GitHub Sponsors:
[https://github.com/sponsors/minimaxir](https://github.com/sponsors/minimaxir)

It seems less...fun than Patreon? Although Patreon is less code-content-
focused, so maybe GitHub Sponsors can hit that niche a bit better. (although
I'm not sure the current Sponsor button on a GitHub repo is an effective CTA,
and I haven't yet found a good balance between self-promotion of a
Patreon/GitHub Sponsorship and the content itself).

Compare/contrast my own Patreon page:
[https://www.patreon.com/minimaxir](https://www.patreon.com/minimaxir)

~~~
Deimorz
Do you deliberately have it set up so that $200/month is the only option for
sponsoring? People sponsoring you _must_ choose a tier, and currently that's
the only one you have available, so nobody can sponsor for any amount except
that.

~~~
minimaxir
Wait, what?

I was under the impression that it was like Patreon, e.g. people can donate
whatever they want, and if they get to a goal, then that goal applies.

Looking at the backend for the Sponsorship, the copy for it is ambiguous
(especially given how Patreon operates); the copy on the page itself is more
clear.

I'll definitely fix that. Thanks for flagging!

------
ddevault
I'll add my account to the pile of people posting theirs:

[https://github.com/sponsors/ddevault](https://github.com/sponsors/ddevault)

Thanks to GitHub adding an API a few days ago for accessing your sponsors
programmatically, I've updated my donation hub with the relevant info from
GitHub:

[https://drewdevault.com/donate](https://drewdevault.com/donate)

I'd encourage anyone else who is relying on donations for their open source
work to consider doing a similar process of income diversification. We don't
want to have all of our eggs in one GitHub-sized basket. If anyone needs help
setting up a fosspay instance like mine, please reach out.

~~~
alexellisuk
I have been waiting for API access for a while, can you link me to the docs?

~~~
ddevault
[https://github.com/github/github-sponsors-
beta/issues/23](https://github.com/github/github-sponsors-beta/issues/23)

------
feross
I got early access to GitHub Sponsors:
[https://github.com/sponsors/feross](https://github.com/sponsors/feross)

I'm the author and maintainer of WebTorrent, StandardJS, and other packages. I
joined GitHub Sponsors so I could spend more time maintaining the 100s of
projects that I've written over the years and continue developing new
projects.

I'm optimistic that the direct call-to-action on GitHub itself will yield much
better results than fundraising methods that take place off of GitHub, such as
Patreon.

I feel that open source funding should primarily come from companies and not
individuals, though of course I'm very grateful to the individuals who support
me. The biggest limitation of the current Sponsors implementation is that only
individuals can become sponsors. Once there's support for organization
sponsors, I expect to see lots more money flowing through the system.

~~~
ronilan
_> The biggest limitation of the current Sponsors implementation is that only
individuals can become sponsors._

Interesting.

Wonder what was github thinking around this. Seems backwards. Stripe should be
your sponsor not Patrick.

~~~
dantiberian
It's a good question, GitHub posted an FAQ a few months ago and talked about
this a little bit: [https://github.blog/2019-06-12-faq-with-the-github-
sponsors-...](https://github.blog/2019-06-12-faq-with-the-github-sponsors-
team/#do-you-plan-to-support-corporate-sponsors-and-sponsored-teams-why-did-
you-start-with-individual-sponsors-and-sponsored-developers)

> Today’s GitHub Sponsors is just the first step, and we plan to extend the
> types of sponsorships it supports.

------
ocdtrekkie
GitHub seems to have done a pretty good job under Microsoft expanding to a
larger portion of the open source development pipeline, between the package
repository feature and the sponsorship platform here. So far I'm impressed.

I have Patreon set up already for a handful of people I support, but being
able to just mash a button on a GitHub thing I care about is pretty awesome.

My biggest question: Can you sponsor projects, or just people? Because while
often they may be one in the same, what if I want to support an org-managed
project?

------
greggman2
I know we need to sponsor more open source development but I worry removing
the friction is going to turn open source dev into Youtube. Make the money
easy to collect and the vultures will appear from simple "take any project,
rename, repost, profit!" (the licenses allow this) to just people trying to
find any and every possible way to get the money pointed at them.

Even before this particular feature I've seen projects that are effectively 20
lines of code of glued together libraries asking for donations like they
actually did something worthy of donation. (maybe there is some 20 line
project out there actually worthy of donation but the examples I've seen are
arguably not special 20 lines).

I'll cross my fingers we get mostly positives and few negatives.

------
alexellisuk
I tried Patreon for 3 years and got nowhere with it, the visibility and
ubiquity of GitHub really helped.

Here are my tiers - I like that GitHub approach this as sponsoring a developer
and not a specific project. All my OSS current and future work is covered by
my Insider email Updates sent via the platform on: inlets, k3sup, K8s on RPi,
OpenFaaS and OpenFaaS Cloud.

YouTube video on my thoughts -
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ouCsrvHIXwk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ouCsrvHIXwk)

[https://github.com/sponsors/alexellis/](https://github.com/sponsors/alexellis/)

------
securingsincity
Now that it's live, despite being on it for a few weeks, i'm interested to see
if folks use it. I've had support through some other places [1] [2], I guess
this [3] is more integrated to github on the whole. While I'm optimistic,
people are not in the habit of supporting projects, and if they are it's
usually the largest projects. I included what people have contributed in the
past for a pretty popular project (2k+ stars on github, about 500k-700k
downloads on npm a month)

[1] [https://opencollective.com/react-ace](https://opencollective.com/react-
ace) \- about $100 USD total [2]
[https://www.buymeacoffee.com/j](https://www.buymeacoffee.com/j) \- $25 usd
total [3]
[https://github.com/sponsors/securingsincity](https://github.com/sponsors/securingsincity)
\- $0 usd so far

------
stared
I got approved as well:
[https://github.com/sponsors/stared/](https://github.com/sponsors/stared/)

It looks like a minimalistic Patreon (intro + tiers + posts for the sponsors).
While I like the clean design, it misses the motivating parts:

\- Listing the number of sponsors (oh, other people support them too!)

\- Goals.

Personally, I don't count to get any suitable income. At the same time, I
hoped to get motivation - people caring about my projects enough to pay $2.

I ended up getting hundreds of likes on FB + LinkedIn, I got first nothing (it
was disheartening) and then 2 sponsors (well, I am grateful to them).

Meanwhile, a few times I got invited for an open-source project thanks to my
other open source project (now I am at CQT, Singapore invited to develop an
open-source Quantum Game 2.0)!

So my question is: even within open-source, is crowdsponsoring a viable model?

~~~
sinstein
It does list the number of sponsors -
[https://imgur.com/a/46u0ZIz](https://imgur.com/a/46u0ZIz)

~~~
stared
Yes, but not per tier.

------
Deimorz
I was approved a couple of weeks ago and encouraged people donating to Tildes
to move over to using GitHub Sponsors
([https://tild.es/it2](https://tild.es/it2)), which has gone pretty well so
far, with about half of my recurring donators using it now:
[https://github.com/sponsors/Deimos](https://github.com/sponsors/Deimos)

As explained in the linked post, for anyone that can use GitHub Sponsors, it
will be the best available method for receiving donations/support right now,
since they're not charging any fees at all, which means the recipient gets
about 10% more than they would through Patreon. The $5000 USD matching for the
first year is also amazing for smaller projects like mine where that can
represent a significant chunk of donations.

My only real complaint so far is that the contribution-matching excludes some
supporters in unclear ways. It seems like GitHub doesn't want to match
contributions from (some?) new GitHub accounts due to potential abuse, but
that's a little annoying for projects like mine where the target audience
isn't exclusively developers and some people will be signing up for GitHub
solely to donate. There also isn't any indication on my end for which
contributions are being matched or not, so it's not possible to figure out
exactly what my current monthly income from GitHub is.

It's not a big deal overall since it's still the best donation method even
without matching, but it would be nice if they could try to make the fraud
checks based on conditions outside of the GitHub account, like making sure
that the accounts aren't using the same credit card as other contributors.
It's been a little disappointing for some of my users to see that their
contributions won't be matched.

I have some other minor complaints about a few aspects (e.g. forced tiers),
but the main other issue is that everything is tied to individuals vs.
organizations. There's no way to sponsor an organization/project, or sponsor
_as_ an organization. It sounds like they're working on that though, so
hopefully that will be available before too long.

------
JoeMayoBot
Looked at it a while ago and decided not to. People occasionally ask if I take
donations, but never have. While I could change my mind in the future, today
my code is a contribution to the community.

------
fierarul
I don't understand. They offer: Stripe Connect, ACH transfer, or wire
transfer.

Only Stripe Connect (whatever that is) seems to have a list of countries.

Wire transfer should work all over the place.

~~~
derekprior
GitHub Sponsors is out of beta for developers with a bank account in any of
the 30 countries supported by Stripe.

For folks with bank accounts outside of that list, GitHub Sponsors is still in
beta, we're accepting applications, and we’ll continue to roll out general
availability to those countries in the coming months.

~~~
fierarul
Thanks. The blog post could be edited a bit then. It says:

> GitHub Sponsors is now out of beta and generally available to developers
> with bank accounts in 30 countries and growing.

and the link points to [https://help.github.com/en/github/supporting-the-open-
source...](https://help.github.com/en/github/supporting-the-open-source-
community-with-github-sponsors/becoming-a-sponsored-developer#submitting-your-
bank-and-tax-information) where only Stripe Connect has a list of countries
while wire is also a possibility.

It's not obvious that somehow out of beta means mandatory Stripe Connect and
no wire transfer. Although I assume that perhaps you use Stripe for wire
transfers too?

~~~
devonzuegel
Thanks for the feedback! We've updated the post to clarify the options for
folks who don't have a bank account in one of the 30 countries currently out
of beta: [https://github.blog/2019-11-04-github-sponsors-is-now-out-
of...](https://github.blog/2019-11-04-github-sponsors-is-now-out-of-beta-
in-30-countries/#next-steps)

We do support ACH transfer and wire transfer (as noted in the documentation)
for developers with bank accounts in countries that are still in the limited
beta. In the coming months, we'll be expanding general availability for more
countries on a rolling basis. I'll look into clarifying that in the help docs
too.

------
splitbrain
It's interesting to look at the different sponsor pages posted in this thread.

When I got invited, I basically copied my text over from patreon. But it seems
the way to address github sponsors is a bit different in tone.

I also noticed that many start their tiers at $5 instead of just at $1.

Obligatory sponsorship link:
[https://github.com/sponsors/splitbrain](https://github.com/sponsors/splitbrain)

------
sinstein
Is there a list of developers who are approved to accept sponsors on Github?

For certain projects, I already follow the people running them and became a
sponsor when I got to know about them being on-boarded to the program (eg:
cUrl).

It would help if I could see a list of all users accepting donations and
figure out if I use any of their creations in my day to day work.

------
FlorianRappl
Not a big fish as many others here, but just for completeness:

[https://github.com/sponsors/florianrappl](https://github.com/sponsors/florianrappl)

I'd love if this (GitHub sponsors in general, not my personal account) would
be successful - so far doing open-source projects was a great experience!

------
ilikehurdles
I would like to know what the future "nominal transaction fee" will be.

------
ashishb
I got approved a few weeks back as well
[https://github.com/sponsors/ashishb/](https://github.com/sponsors/ashishb/)

------
dang
The big thread on this was
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19989684](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19989684)

------
koolba
Now that this in GA, anybody try cross matching to milk^Wearn the $5K bonus?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19991341](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19991341)

~~~
Deimorz
That's explicitly against the terms of the program:
[https://help.github.com/en/github/supporting-the-open-
source...](https://help.github.com/en/github/supporting-the-open-source-
community-with-github-sponsors/about-github-sponsors#about-the-github-
sponsors-matching-fund)

> "Donation for donation" schemes or other attempts to game the GitHub
> Sponsors Matching Fund are a violation of this policy and the GitHub
> Sponsors Additional Terms, and any funds matched during this period will be
> revoked.

------
tomaszs
It is good for GitHub but it is not how it should work. Money should go along
with pulls. Its only way to push some money to architects of the IT

------
PunchTornado
does microsoft still match user donations?

------
ossworkerrights
Finally, democratising open source monetisation.

