What is it about?

Thousands of people pay open-source developers directly through GitHub Sponsors, but GitHub offers no way to study it in bulk. We built a tool that continuously walks the sponsorship network and publishes what it finds through an open dashboard and CSV exports. A 72-hour run captured 49,000 users across 144 countries. Giving is widespread; receiving is not. Roughly five and a half people sponsor for every one who gets sponsored.

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Why is it important?

Critical software is often maintained by unpaid volunteers, and GitHub Sponsors is one of the few direct ways to change that. Until now there was no independent way to check whether it works. Our observatory shows who participates and where they are, so maintainers can benchmark themselves, researchers can test whether funding prevents project abandonment, and funders can see how far their money actually reaches.

Perspectives

I expected the funding to be uneven. I did not expect over 40,000 accounts to be sponsoring someone while fewer than 7,500 receive anything at all. Generosity is broad; the money is not. I built this as a running service rather than a fixed dataset because sponsorship snapshots go stale within months, and I would rather someone else answer the questions I could not fit into five pages.

Rylan Hiltz
Trent University

Read the Original

This page is a summary of: Mapping GitHub Sponsorships: A Longitudinal Observatory for Open-Source Sustainability, July 2026, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery),
DOI: 10.1145/3803437.3806425.
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