Open source funding
Funding Your Open Source Project When You Have Users but No Sponsors
There's a specific kind of open source project the funding ecosystem quietly ignores.
It has thousands of daily users. People run it every day. It sits in their terminal, their editor, their CI pipeline. By any honest measure of impact, it's a success. And it earns approximately nothing: a "Buy me a coffee" link that covers the domain renewal, maybe a hand full of GitHub Sponsors at five dollars a month.
If that's your project, the instinct is to assume you've done something wrong. You haven't marketed it properly. Your README isn't sponsor-ready. You haven't asked hard enough.
Usually that's not it. The dominant funding model was built for a different shape of project, and no amount of effort inside that model changes the shape of your project. This post is about why that gap exists, what your realistic options are, and how to pick between them.
Why sponsorship rewards importance, not usage
The standard advice is: set up GitHub Sponsors or Open Collective, make the project sponsor-ready, and court the companies that depend on you.
That advice works, for a particular kind of project. It works when your tool is infrastructure a company's product would break without. Babel, Webpack, and ESLint fund real work this way, with corporate tiers running four to five figures a month. The mechanism is simple: a company sponsors you because it has quantified the risk of you disappearing, and because a logo in your README buys visibility with developers it wants to hire.
Look at what that actually rewards. Not usage. Leverage: specifically, importance to a single organization with a budget. It's relationship-driven and pull-based: build a case, find the right person in engineering or marketing, wait. Maintainers who've done it describe six months between first contact and first payment as normal.
Now consider what the model has nothing to say about. A popular terminal UI no company depends on. A CLI thousands of individuals love that no single employer would notice going dark. A coding-agent plugin with a devoted following and zero enterprise footprint. These tools have enormous usage and no leverage. There's no CFO who fears their absence.
That's the gap, and it's worth naming precisely: your value is spread thin across thousands of individuals instead of concentrated in one company that can be pitched. Sponsorship has no mechanism for aggregating diffuse value. It only knows how to convert concentrated dependency.
This is also why the advice you've read feels useless. It isn't wrong. It's addressed to someone else.
Working the sponsorship model anyway
Before writing sponsorship off, it's worth knowing that the gap is sometimes narrower than it looks, and that most maintainers approach corporate sponsorship in the way least likely to work.
Find the dependency you can't see. You may have more corporate leverage than you think; you just can't observe it. Check who's depending on you: GitHub's dependency graph, the network tab on your repo, npm/PyPI download spikes from cloud IP ranges, mentions in engineering blogs, issues filed from work accounts. Maintainers are routinely surprised to find a Fortune 500 company running their tool in production. That's a concrete, nameable dependency: the exact thing sponsorship knows how to price.
Pitch a budget that already exists. The most common failure is asking a company to create a line item for open source. Almost nobody has one, and creating one can take a year. Money moves much faster out of budgets that already exist: marketing (developer awareness, brand alignment), recruiting (your users are their hiring pool), or engineering (this is cheaper than the risk of maintaining a fork). Frame the ask in the language of the budget you're targeting, not in the language of donation.
Ask for a specific number attached to specific work. "Support the project" is easy to defer. "$800/month funds a monthly release cycle and security patches within 48 hours" is a decision someone can actually approve, and it gives them something to report internally.
If you have even one identifiable company dependency, this is worth six months of patient effort before concluding the model doesn't fit. If you genuinely have none (your users are individuals, hobbyists, and small teams), it won't work no matter how well you pitch, and the rest of this post is more relevant.
The models that don't fit, and the ones that might
Every "7 ways to monetize open source" article covers the same options. What those posts rarely say is that each one assumes a particular product shape, and most well-used developer tools don't have it. Here's the honest version.
Open core: free base, paid enterprise features. Works when there's a natural enterprise seam: SSO, team management, audit logs, compliance reporting, centralized policy. Doesn't work for a focused single-purpose tool where there's nothing to wall off without damaging the thing people love. The diagnostic question: is there a feature only organizations need that individuals genuinely don't? If you have to invent one, this isn't your model.
SaaS hosting: run it as a managed service. Works when self-hosting is genuinely painful: state to manage, infrastructure to run, uptime that matters. Irrelevant for a CLI or terminal app that by its nature runs locally on a developer's machine. Don't force it.
Support and consulting: sell your time. This is real money and often the fastest path to your first meaningful income. The catch is that it's not passive and doesn't scale: it converts you from a maintainer into a services business, capped by the hours you'll sell. Worth doing deliberately as a bridge, or as a business you actually want. Corrosive if you back into it accidentally and it eats the time you meant to spend on the project.
Dual licensing: free under a copyleft license, paid for commercial/proprietary use. Genuinely effective where it applies, but it requires that commercial users have a real reason to need the alternative license, and it requires clean IP ownership (a CLA from every contributor, which is hard to add retroactively). Relicensing an established project also reliably ignites community backlash: MongoDB, Elastic, and others all discovered this publicly.
Grants: Sovereign Tech Fund, NLnet, NGI, GitHub Accelerator, Open Technology Fund, language-specific foundations. Chronically underused by exactly the projects in this position, because maintainers assume grants are for something bigger or more academic. Several explicitly target widely-used-but-underfunded infrastructure, which is precisely this gap. The money is lumpy and non-recurring, so it funds a push rather than a salary, but for a project with real usage and no corporate backers, this is often the highest-expected-value hour you can spend. Start here if you haven't.
Individual donations: GitHub Sponsors, Open Collective, Ko-fi. Nearly always undersized relative to expectations. A useful rule of thumb: a very small fraction of even enthusiastic users ever donate, so this scales with audience size but at a punishing ratio. Worth having set up. Not worth building a plan around.
If you've read that list and none of them fit, you're not being difficult. You have a tool with a large, diffuse, individual user base and no enterprise seam. That combination defeats most of the standard playbook.
What to actually do, in order
For a project with real usage and no corporate backers, a realistic sequence:
- Audit for hidden corporate dependency first. It's the cheapest thing to check and the highest payoff if you find it. One identified company changes which model you're in.
- Apply for grants. Underrated, well-matched to this exact profile, and non-dilutive. Even one grant buys months of runway.
- Set up donations and stop thinking about them. Low ceiling, near-zero effort, occasionally surprising. Just don't build the plan on it.
- Decide consciously about services. If you want a consulting business, build one deliberately. If you don't, refuse the work early rather than drifting into it.
- Reduce the cost side. Underrated: aggressive issue triage policies, saying no to features, adding maintainers, or moving the project to a foundation reduces the funding you need in the first place. Sustainability isn't only a revenue problem.
And then there's the axis none of these touch.
The axis nobody's using: attention
Every model above tries to convert your project into either a dependency (sponsorship, dual licensing) or a product (open core, SaaS, support). If your project resists both (and many well-used developer tools do), you're left with the thing you unambiguously have and have never monetized: people's attention, every single day.
Most developer tools have moments where a user is actively watching and waiting. A build runs. Tests execute. A deploy finishes. An agent works through a task while the developer watches output scroll. Those moments are yours, they recur, and they're genuinely watched. In every other medium that has ever existed, that's a fundable asset. In open source developer tools, it's been left almost entirely on the table, partly for good reasons, since the obvious implementation is banner ads and trackers, which would rightly get you crucified.
But the reason it's untapped is the implementation, not the premise. The premise is sound: attention scales with usage, which is the one thing these projects have in abundance. It doesn't require a company to depend on you, a feature to wall off, or hours of your time.
This is the gap we built ADtention for: one clearly labeled sponsor line in a moment your users already watch, rendered in your own UI and kept outside prompts, tool results, and model output. You own the placement, styling, frequency, category limits, and the kill switch. The serving request carries only a broad interest category and pseudonymous delivery metadata, never your users' prompts, code, files, tool results, model output, or account identity. Publishers keep 50% of billable impression revenue, where a line counts only after it has actually rendered, and demand and fill are never guaranteed.
It only works if your tool has a surface (a CLI, TUI, terminal app, coding agent, dashboard, status bar) with a recurring state a user is present to watch. A headless library has nowhere to put it, and for those projects the earlier sections of this post are the whole answer. It also isn't a replacement for sponsorship; it's a complement that pays on the axis sponsorship ignores. If you want to know whether your surface qualifies, show us the state your users watch and we'll tell you before you spend any integration time.
The broader point stands regardless of what you do about it: a project with thousands of daily users and no funding isn't a failed project. It's a project whose value is real and whose funding model hasn't been invented for it yet. Diversify across whichever of the above actually fit your shape, and stop measuring yourself against advice written for infrastructure you didn't build.
Frequently asked questions
Can you fund an open source project that has users but no sponsors?
Yes. Start by checking for hidden corporate dependency, since a company running you in production is a concrete sponsorship lead. Then apply for grants, set up donations, and consider attention-based funding if your tool has a watched surface. Sponsorship rewards importance to one company; these paths reward the diffuse usage you already have.
What are the best alternatives to GitHub Sponsors for a developer tool?
The realistic options are grants (Sovereign Tech Fund, NLnet, NGI, GitHub Accelerator), open core, SaaS hosting, support and consulting, dual licensing, individual donations (Open Collective, Ko-fi), and attention-based funding. Each one assumes a particular product shape, so the useful question is which fits your tool rather than which is best in general.
Are open source grants worth applying for?
For a project with real usage and no corporate backers, grants are often the highest-expected-value hour you can spend. Several programs explicitly target widely used but underfunded infrastructure, which is exactly this gap. The money is lumpy and non-recurring, so it funds a push rather than a salary, but it is non-dilutive and well matched to this profile.
Is it ethical to put ads in an open source developer tool?
It can be, if the format is honest and bounded: one clearly labeled sponsor line, disclosed rather than disguised, with no user prompts, code, files, model output, or identity in the serving request, and a kill switch you control. The failure mode is a hidden tracker or a banner dressed up as product output.
Which projects are a good fit for attention-based funding?
Tools that own a recurring state a user is present to watch: a CLI, TUI, terminal app, coding agent, dashboard, or status bar where a run, test, deploy, or handoff completes. A headless library or pure backend framework has nowhere to place a line and is better served by grants, sponsorship, or open core.