Andrew Nesbitt (@andrewnez.bsky.social)

Ecosystem Funds is Generally Available **Today Open Source Collective and ecosyste.ms are launching Funds supporting 291 Open Source Ecosystems. Unsurprisingly, we call them Ecosystem Funds.** A few, short weeks before the holidays we announced Ecosystem Funds; a collaboration between Open Source Collective and ecosyste.ms that makes it easier to support your critical software dependencies. ### What are Ecosystem Funds? Using billions of data points from ecosyste.ms we’ve packaged millions of the most critical open source components into a few hundred Funds centred on a language, framework, or package, turning a process that can take months into a five minute conversation with your CTO. ### What have we been up to? We launched with a $67,500 commitment from Sentry to the Rust, Python, Django and Javascript Ecosystems. We’ve since distributed over 80% of the funds in 375 individual payments to 136 projects. We’ve sent money to projects on GitHub Sponsors, Patreon, BuyMeACoffee, Ko-fi, and of course Open Collective. We contacted hundreds maintainers, asking them to update their ‘funding.yml’ so anyone could support them, for those who didn’t we paid maintainers directly, again through Open Collective. We’re hoping to distribute the remaining funds this month which is why we’re launching Ecosystem Funds to the general public today. ### How does it work? Once again for those in the back: Sponsor the technology you depend upon, we’ll do the rest. Find an ecosystem using our search and donate a single or recurring sponsorship. We handle everything else. We’ll direct your money (minus a 10% management fee) to maintainers, using the tools they have chosen to manage their finances. We allocate 100% of the donations in every fund with a balance of $1,000 or more, on a monthly basis. Every donation and payment is traceable through both Ecosystem Funds and Open Collective. Donations can be made directly through funds.ecosyste.ms or, if you have an account, on Open Collective. Companies who wish to make a large donation, or start a Fund of their own, can request an Invoice from Open Source Collective — who are already an approved vendor to most large open-source-supporting organisations. ### What’s next? While we’re launching with nearly three hundred Funds we’re certain that we’ll have missed more than a few ecosystems around your favourite framework, tool, or package, and we’re happy to add them. Just get in touch and we’ll do some data wrangling to add it — note that we’re not going to include a Fund for just the projects you work on, that’s what GitHub Sponsors is for. We’re also hugely aware of the limitations of our approach. We’re missing all the standards bodies, documentation projects, and foundations who support open source outside of the dependency graph. We’re also missing domain-specific Funds, there’s no climate, marine, aviation, or space-exploration based Funds to support. To address this we’ll be building ways for communities (and corporations) to package their own Ecosystem Fund, and support it. ### … Just one more thing While building a service to support thousands of the most critical software components might be enough for some, it’s not for us. Over the coming months we’ll be building a tool to track all your open source ‘investments’, to better understand the impact your money is having on the projects you depend on most. https://blog.ecosyste.ms/2025/04/04/ecosystem-funds-ga.html