We pledged $100,000 to open-source maintainers this year to support the projects that most improve the lives of Astro users. We have a new batch of grants to announce today, along with an update on our progress and the state of open-source funding across our industry as a whole.

Astro is the web framework for building content-driven websites like blogs, marketing, and e-commerce. This year we created the Astro Ecosystem Fund to award $100,000 in large grants to ten project maintainers over the course of the year. Each recipient receives a one-time grant with no strings attached, to support and continue their work on behalf of the larger Astro ecosystem.

I’m excited to announce two new recipients in our latest fall batch:

• @hippotastic ($10,000) for work on the Expressive Code advanced syntax highlighter.
• @martrapp ($5,000) for work on VTBOT exploring the bleeding edge of View Transitions in Astro and the larger web platform.

We are thankful to our own major open-source sponsors for making this possible including Netlify, Sentry, Jetbrains and more. Without their support, this initiative would never have been possible.

State of OSS Funding

Hippo and Martin are the fifth and sixth grant recipients from the fund. They join the maintainers of Lucia, Volar, astro-eslint-parser and Lexington themes who all received grants earlier this year. We have $45,000 remaining in the fund, which leaves us with at least 4 more grants to give out before the end of the year. We’re already preparing for an exciting final round of announcements!

Since we announced this program last December, we’ve also seen more attention than ever shift to the unbalanced relationship between free, open-source software and the closed, for-profit corporations that benefit the most from it.

Sentry — one of our own sponsors — recently announced the Open Source Pledge which aims to set a basic bar for ethical corporate consumption of open source: $2,000 paid to open-source software maintenance, per employee, per year. We’re excited by the early momentum of this project and the larger industry conversation it’s kicking off.

About Astro

Astro primarily operates as an open-source project. We follow an open governance model, an open roadmap process, and a completely open budgeting process through Open Collective. We have a company that supports the project with full-time resources, but otherwise, all of our funding on Open Collective comes from sponsorships and donations to the project by companies and some amazing individuals.

Interested in supporting our work? Sponsor us! 100% of funds raised are invested back into the community. Learn more about our approach to open-source funding on GitHub and browse our fully transparent project finances on Open Collective.

Building a website? Check out Astro.