Why Stripe sponsors open source

Ensuring those open source projects are healthy, secure, and well supported is a major priority for Stripe. It's not just the right thing to do: Investing in open source improves the company's bottom line. The company supports open source in many ways, from upstream contributions to projects they use to releasing their own open source projects to direct funding.

In 2020, the company scaled up their efforts and formalized their sponsorship program. Today, Stripe funds 11 different projects on a ongoing basis.

In this article we'll:

• Learn how and why Stripe sponsors open source projects

• Explore how you can measure the financial benefits of open source in your own organization

Beyond altruism: Why Stripe sponsors open source

Fix credits the program's success on how tied it is to providing business value to Stripe as a company. "Our primary motivation was to invest in the open source software that our users depend on to run their businesses," says Fix. "We want all engineers at Stripe to have access to the best tools to get their jobs done."

The best way to build a sustainable funding program for open source projects, Stripe found, is a symbiotic approach of aligning the company's users' needs with those of maintainers. "Companies need to balance open source investment against everything else on their books, so it's essential to know that sponsorship is delivering value, directly or indirectly, for our users," Fix says.

How Stripe picks projects and distributes funds

The OSPO team at Stripe gathered usage statistics like API calls and package downloads to determine what open source projects were most important to the company, and consulted their own developers internally about what packages they use and which ones would benefit from investment. Then they talked directly with the maintainers of those packages about how they could best support them. "We really wanted to understand how much investment was required for developers to make conscious changes in their lives to spend more time maintaining their open source projects," Fix says. The Stripe OSPO team makes the final call on which projects to fund in cooperation with their CTO.

The main success criteria Stripe judges its sponsorship decisions against, is how well the projects are being maintained.

Stripe distributes funds via GitHub Sponsors and Open Collective. "These platforms are 'open source native'," Fix says. "It's where developers already are. Plus the platforms have a global reach, which is important since Stripe is sponsoring developers in 11 different countries thus far.

Fix encourages other organizations considering sponsorship programs to treat funding platforms like vendors. Putting them through a standard procurement process makes it easier for everyone across your organization to interact with them.

Measuring the financial benefits of open source in your organization

Fix recommends that any organizations thinking about spinning up their own OSS sponsorship program first focus on connecting sponsorships to their organization's business goals, and measure the return on investment towards those goals.

In addition to measuring how much user value open source projects enable, Fix recommends a few other things to consider:

• How much money does open source save your organization? How much time does open source save your developers?

• Has an open source project, for example an integration or SDK, helped land a sale?

• Has an open source project unblocked a launch?

One thing to keep in mind, however, is that cost savings can be one-off events, and it's best to look for ongoing benefits created by open source projects in order to create more sustainable funding programs.

"Identifying and tracking these benefits enables you to deploy the greatest amount of sponsorship dollars over the longest period of time," Fix says. "It's what's best both for your organization and the open source community."