TL;DR: Keploy is starting a fund to support open-source projects and maintainers.
We're giving ~$12,500 per developer at Keploy per year, in alignment with and inspired by Sentry's OSS Pledge initiative.
Why start an open source fund?
Our team is composed of open source maintainers and contributors, our products are open source, and everything we do takes place in the context of our open source community.
While there are many ways to give back to open source projects — such as making high quality contributions and filing bug reports — there's some work that can only be done by project owners and maintainers.
Today, Keploy has over 5.2K Stars, 850+ Contributors, 900 Forks, and thousands of contributions made, all with the help, support, and love of the open-source community.
With the Keploy OSS Fund, our goal is to help establish a precedent for giving early and often — to reinforce that sponsorship should be the norm, rather than the exception.
Giving back to the community
This financial power meant many things, such as Appwrite could build a team, invest in a better product offering, community swag, and start an OSS fund. And all of it with one thing in mind, giving back to the community. Helping those who have helped us.
Hiring from the OSS community
The first thing Keploy did with the funding was build out the team. And what better place to find the right people than in the open-source community? We hired some of the first and top Keploy contributors. Sarthak Shyngle, Charan Kamarapu and Gourav Kumar. They formed Keploy’s founding engineering team.
OSS Fund
We're starting our fund at $12,500 per year: $1,700 for open source-projects and maintainers. This comes out to $1,800 per developer at Keploy. Since this is a new initiative, we'll be assessing our budget quarterly, but we're committed to giving at least this amount over the next year. As we hire more developers, our budget will increase, keeping our contributions in sync with the growth of the company.
We then ensured that candidate projects met two additional criteria:
Availability on GitHub Sponsors: We're a small team of engineers looking to minimize administrative overhead. We've reached out to a few proposed projects that aren't available via GitHub Sponsors, but this excludes some candidates that we'd like to support in the future.
Lack of conflicts: We avoided projects that are maintained by Astral team members.
The goal of this fund is to thank, encourage, and empower maintainers. Some maintainers offer additional features or support in exchange for funding — we think that's a good model, but we want to keep this fund separate from our business needs, so we'll make exchanges for goods and services in addition to this fund.
Who are we funding?
We're giving between $20 and $150 per month per project/maintainer. With these amounts, we're balancing the number of projects we can sponsor with an amount that is meaningful to maintainers.
What's next?
We've biased towards action by establishing this fund now, but the work isn't done. We look forward to improving the process, growing the budget, and supporting more projects in the future.
And, of course, thank you to all the maintainers and contributors that keep the open source community going — you're an inspiration to us.