OSS Funding & Sponsorship Platforms

Where individual maintainers and project funds receive recurring and one-off donations — free-and-OSS-first.

If your dependency stack is breathing on the labor of unpaid maintainers, this is the page that closes the loop. Pair with Payments for Polar.sh / Stripe context, OSS Foundations & Fiscal Sponsors for project-level homes, and OSS Grants & Sovereign Tech Fund for larger non-recurring funding.

Free / OSS-aligned (start here)

★ ★ GitHub Sponsors — the largest by volume; free for sponsors, free for sponsored individuals (GitHub waives platform fees for individual maintainers; orgs may pay processing). Native to where the code lives. The default in 2026.
★ ★ Open Collective — fully transparent project finances ("open finances"); a project gets a public ledger of every expense. Free OSS platform; the platform's hosted service charges a small platform fee but Open Collective Foundation and OSC can act as fiscal hosts. Best when a project (not just a person) needs to receive money.
★ Liberapay — privacy-respecting, AGPL OSS, run as a non-profit; only takes payment-processor fees (no platform cut). Recurring weekly donations. The pick when you don't want a US-corp middleman.
★ thanks.dev — free; analyzes your package.json / Cargo.toml / requirements.txt and helps you fund the dependencies you actually use. Auto-distributes to maintainers.

★ Polar.sh — developer-focused funding + product monetization; native GitHub Sponsors-shaped flow plus paid issues, paid releases, and Merchant-of-Record handling. See Payments. Paid (platform fee + Stripe).
StackAid — paid; auto-distributes a single monthly contribution across your dependency tree.
Tidelift — enterprise subscription that bundles a curated list of OSS packages with maintainer payments + assurances. Paid; useful as a procurement-line-item story for companies who can't easily justify "donations."

Patreon — paid; content-creator framing; works for OSS folks who also publish a podcast / YouTube / newsletter.
Buy Me a Coffee — paid; one-off + recurring; very low friction.
Ko-fi — paid; one-off + memberships + 0% on one-off tips (paid tiers for premium).

GitHub Sponsors for Organizations — sponsor a project; project chooses how to split.
PyPI / npm Tidelift — bundled packages by ecosystem.
Open Source Collective (host on Open Collective) — fiscal-host umbrella for thousands of OSS projects (no separate 501(c)(3) needed for the project itself).

Default for one maintainer: GitHub Sponsors — money goes where the code is.
Default for a multi-contributor project: Open Collective — open ledger, fiscal host, splits handled.
Default if you object to GH/Stripe lock-in: Liberapay.
The hard truth: most OSS funding is still 80/20 — a handful of projects get most donations. Tools like thanks.dev / StackAid are the most promising structural fix because they auto-distribute to dependencies you actually use rather than the names you remember.

You maintain one popular library and want recurring income: GitHub Sponsors.
You run a multi-contributor project and need a fiscal host: Open Collective (Open Source Collective host).
Privacy-aligned, AGPL/EU-flavored: Liberapay.
You want to pay for the dependencies you actually use: thanks.dev or StackAid.
Your company needs a procurement-shaped invoice: Tidelift.
You're already monetizing GitHub repos commercially: Polar.sh — see Payments.