StackAid is a simple way to donate to all the open source software projects you depend on. By subscribing to StackAid, we'll distribute your subscription fee among your projects' direct and indirect dependencies based on your project configuration (eg: package.json).

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The problem isn’t a lack of means or desire. Decision paralysis as well as the mechanics of paying are the dam holding back open source funding. Any trivial project can have a dozen dependencies and many more indirect dependencies. If you decide to fund your direct dependencies, here are the questions you then have to answer:

• How much should I give to each project?
• How do I fund each of these projects?

Assuming you’ve figured out those questions, you might still be wondering if this is workable. Will everyone else, especially the dependencies you fund, go to this effort to fund their dependencies? Probably not.

The monthly subscription amount you choose is divided evenly across all your direct dependencies. Each direct dependency then automatically shares up to half of its allocation with its dependencies.

Let’s make this concrete:

{
  "dependencies": {
    "bootstrap": "^5.1.0",
    "sass": "^1.38.0"
  }
}

With a current subscription of $20/month, bootstrap and sass are both allocated ($20 * 12 / 2) = $120/year. sass has 3 dependencies and so it shares up to 50% of it’s allocation with its dependencies, each capped at 5%, and sass is left with the difference. Since bootstrap has over 20 dependencies it shares the full 50% of its allocation equallly among them.

Here's the allocation breakdown:

sass/dart-sass (3)           $102/yr
├ paulmillr/chokidar           $6/yr
├ immutable-js/immutable-js    $6/yr
└ 7rulnik/source-map-js        $6/yr
twbs/bootstrap (19)           $60/yr
├ postcss/autoprefixer         $3/yr
├ babel/babel                  $3/yr
├ bundlewatch/bundlewatch      $3/yr
├ clean-css/clean-css-cli      $3/yr
├ kentcdodds/cross-env         $3/yr
└ 14 more

You'll notice above that sass earns $1/yr more than expected. This is because bootstrap also depends on sass so it receives an indirect dependency allocation from bootstrap.

Play around with our analyze tool to see how funding your dependencies could work.

Subscriptions start at $15/developer/month.

When you add your project dependencies, StackAid is treated as an implicit direct dependency. StackAid is on equal footing, but unlike those dependencies, StackAid's allocation is capped at 7.5%.

StackAid’s GitHub app searches your repositories for package dependency files. For example, for JavaScript projects we look for package.json files.

No, you can use our GitHub action to automatically generate and publish a stackaid.json file which lists your dependencies.

You can of course manually curate the list of projects you want to fund. For example, if you wanted to allocate money to the Linux kernel and Node.js, then you would add these two repositories to your stackaid.json file:

{
  "version": 1,
  "dependencies": [
    { "source": "https://github.com/torvalds/linux" },
    { "source": "https://github.com/nodejs/node" }
  ]
}

We are working on bringing the same level of automated discovery and integration for Node.js projects to other ecosystems.

Yes, we recommend setting up a new repository that's just meant to be shared with StackAid and then use our GitHub action to automatically publish your dependencies there for discovery.

Owners of open source projects can claim their repositories by installing the StackAid GitHub app. As part of the claiming process, owners can associate one or more Stripe accounts with each repository they own to receive payments.

Once a month the money allocated for each repository is split evenly among the associated Stripe accounts.

Stripe accounts can belong to a single person or an organization that has its own rules for how the money will be put to use.

A project's allocations accumulate for 2 months. If the project is not claimed by then, an automatic reallocation happens and the amount is redistributed to the other dependencies that are claimed. Reallocation occurs on a per subscription basis.

While it’s easy to understand how a single subscription is distributed, it’s hard to tell if this is fair and meaningful. We had the same question, so we built a simulation of 5,000 subscribers for a year.

The bottom line is that the long tail is pretty fat. Popular projects do well, but StackAid funds many more projects that would otherwise get overlooked.