Earlier this year, GitHub announced Sponsors:

a new way to financially support the developers who build the open source software you use every day

Like all of us, I celebrated the news. Open source projects need financial sponsors to motivate maintainers and ensure they stick around.

But let's be honest, if you aren't a large project that's absolutely vital to many large organizations, odds are you won't see sponsorship dollars flowing your way. I'd wager that GitHub Sponsors already follow a power law distribution with a very small percentage of repos getting most of the available sponsorship funding:

So, what're open source maintainers to do? A lot of the options like having a hosted offering or dual licensing still don't apply well to smaller projects–are you going to dual license your semi-popular NPM package?

I do think there are other options for these smaller projects.

One idea is bug bounties. We've all encountered an issue with an open source project and been annoyed that it took 2 weeks to get a comment from a maintainer. It'd be great if GitHub added the option for a repo to support a bug bounty: allow anyone filing a bug to offer a bounty if addressed within some time frame.

This proposal is complicated because offering money to a maintainer if an issue is closed might simply incentivize them to close issues without solving the underlying problem.

I'd offer a simpler alternative: offer people your support time for money.

There are lots of issues where filing a bug seems so much longer than just getting a maintainer on the phone for 30-60m and hashing something out quickly. My hunch is that there's a bigger market for this than we think.

I'm not a prolific open source author, but I've added this method to two small repos I maintain.

Here's how you can do the same setup.

1. Create Accounts

You'll need Calendly, Zoom and PayPal Business accounts if you don't already have them.

2. Link PayPal and Zoom to Calendly

Link your PayPal and Zoom accounts in Calendly.

3. Create A New One-on-One Calendly Event

Create a new one-on-one event type in Calendly (I called mine "Open Source Consulting Chat"). Set the location to Zoom so that you'll automatically get a video hangout invite with the participant.

Configure the event so that it works for your schedule. I went with the following options:

• 60m minimums
• $80 hourly rate
• Must book 24h in advance
• Events schedlued over rolling 60d
• Cancellation policy: "Cancellations resulting in refunds are only valid when received at least 4 hours before our meeting."
• No screening questions apart from "Please share anything that will help prepare for our meeting."

4. Create and Add a Badge to Your Repo

I haven't bothered adding an official badge yet, but instead opted to create one in Figma which you're welcome to clone and edit.

Once you've deployed your badge somewhere (AWS S3, Google Cloud Storage), add it to your project's README and other documentation as an option for users looking to get a little face time with you.

Caveat

This method doesn't work very well for teams of maintainers, but perhaps Calendly's teams functionality would work. I haven't tried that yet.

Conclusion

Trading time for money isn't the ideal way we'd like to fund software, but in my opinion, some money is better than none.

I think it's also a great and very human way of connecting with the more passionate users of your project.

The two projects I mentioned above aren't exactly popular open source projects so I don't expect much, but I'd really like to hear from you if you give this a shot and it works for you.