There are numerous ways to help open source grow. Helping open source projects financially is one of the most important and one of the easiest if you are economically comfortable.
While finding your favorite open source project’s website and making a donation is not a herculean task, Gratipay makes it easier for you to find and support Open Source projects.
Gratipay is an open source startup with the aim to help open source projects. You can find a number of open source projects to support. Once you have found the projects, you can choose the donation amount as per your own comfort. Basically, pay what you want.
Projects are funded on per week basis and the minimum you can donate to a project is 1¢ per week. The maximum amount is set at $1,000 per week. This is done to reduce income volatility by reducing how dependent a project is on a few sources of income.
And it’s not just the headlines projects that are funded via Gratipay, it recently added npm so that more and more open source projects get financial support.
Gratipay handles the task of verifying that you are donating to the actual open source projects and not to someone who is trying to make money by using the name of any open source project.
The best thing here is that Gratipay doesn’t charge any fee for the donations. They themselves get funded the same way as any other open source projects. At present, they get $82 per week.
Think of it like Patreon for Open Source projects with a weekly donation cycle and no fee.
Gratipay aims at both individuals and enterprises. So if your company uses open source projects, you can advise the management to fund those projects on Gratipay. Your individual contribution is equally valuable.
You can find more about Gratipay on their website:
How do you support Open Source projects?