CodeFund Sponsorships is a way to provide funding to open source projects and maintainers. One of the big misconceptions around open source funding is that funding should come from within the community (such as Patreon, Open Collective, and even GitHub Sponsors).
We takes a different approach to the problem. We provide direct sponsorships to GitHub projects and maintainers from companies that wish to share their products and services to the developer ecosystem. The sponsor will be able to track the results of those sponsorships similar to how they do with other marketing efforts. The sponsor will not only fulfill their altruistic desires to support those projects they love, but will also see a return on this investment similar to that found in advertising. This formula encourages more spending which is good for the community.
How does the matchmaking work? Is the list price fixed or can the sponsor negotiate or bid (either up or down)?
It will be up to the maintainer to decide the price. The matchmaking will take place starting in November with a self-service marketplace that sponsors can search and find those projects that are most relevant to them. We will use stargazers, GitHub topics, programming language, downloads, and impressions.
CodeFund is currently running at a loss of around $35k/mo. We need to become profitable for us to stay in business. The money is used to pay the salaries of the employees and keep the lights on.
CodeFund is Code Sponsor 2.0. I'm the founder of Code Sponsor. The difference between what we are doing now vs what we are doing then in regards to GitHub sponsorships is:
- Paid based on time of sponsorship, not per click
- Sponsorships are not rotated like ads are
- Maintainers pre-approve the sponsors
GitHub sponsors is more similar to Patreon or Open Collective. They rely on the charity of others to fund their work. CodeFund understands that the real scalable funding comes from marketing budgets, not charity. We package up the value to companies in a way that they can justify against their marketing spend.
Yes. Currently, if you were to use CodeFund to fund your OSS projects (on websites), you would see daily earnings, daily clicks, advertisers, along with charts/graphs. This is not yet built for Sponsorships yet, but it's something we are working on and plan on officially launching in November. We are currently in the pre-launch stage.
We require that the code be added to the top of the GitHub README. The size is a 400x40 image. You can see an example at gitcoinco/code_fund_ads.
We pay each month for the prior month's earnings. We may consider paying early for sponsorships, but that hasn't been decided yet. We have a form you can fill out this form to tell us the best way to pay you.