GitHub has announced a number of updates to its Sponsors initiative. Sponsors was introduced in 2019 as a way for people to show support for software developers.

Under the scheme, developers can put a “Sponsor Me” button on their GitHub repositories and receive funds from sponsors paid directly into their bank accounts. GitHub says that since its launch Sponsors has helped thousands of open-source developers from 68 regions receive more than $33 million in financial support.

The updates start with a new option of organization-funded sponsorships. These are designed to:

"help organizations sponsor the many projects and maintainers they depend on".

GitHub describes this as being particularly important as sponsorship from organizations are worth on average nearly fifteen times more than the average sponsorship from an individual, and as 90 percent of companies make use of open source software in at least some capacity, GitHub is keen to widen the takeup of industry investment.

During the beta program for the new feature, over 3,500 including AWS, American Express, Shopify, and Mercedes Benz made contributions. In 2022, nearly 40% of sponsorship funding came from organizations.

A second addition to the scheme is bulk sponsorships. What this means is that an organization can set up a list of the projects and maintainers they rely on, and sponsor them all through a single click.

Announcing the addition, GitHub said:

"Organizations sponsoring at scale need better ways to make multiple sponsorships. Last year, GitHub sponsored over 900 of our identified open source dependencies at once and today we're bringing that tooling to you, too. Bulk sponsorships are built into our GitHub Sponsors Explore page so that you have an easy way to get started with your sponsorable dependencies at hand and they're now exportable as a CSV, too."

More Information

GitHub Sponsors

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