Coding agents have changed how software is written. Many developers are all-in. Companies large and small are throwing as much cash as they can find at model tokens. The impacts are complex, massive, and everywhere.
In this new era, GitHub activity tells quite the story:
"[GitHub] platform activity is surging. There were 1 billion commits in 2025. Now, it's 275 million per week ... GitHub Actions has grown from 500M minutes/week in 2023 to 1B minutes/week in 2025, and now 2.1B minutes so far this week." — Kyle Daigle, COO, GitHub, April 4, 2026
This flood brings a lot of good with it. It also brings swells upon swells of new maintenance pressure. New repository issues are long, numerous, and verbose. New contributors are zealous and plentiful, with large PRs full of massive new line counts.
Even with the resources and talent of a strong team, it is hard to keep up. It does not feel sustainable. And what about the projects run by volunteers? The open source maintainers and projects without whom software as we know it, and our beloved internet, would not work?
Software depends on open source. The humble maintainer, historically underappreciated and underpaid, now has to struggle to stay afloat in this new world whether they use agentic coding tools or not.
As great as hyper-intelligent bug finders and contributors are, parsing through all of this information is often exhausting. Some of the more popular projects have turned off their issue queues and PR permissions outright in response.
For those that have embraced these new tools, the rising prices of quality compute mean that, along with their free time, they now need to burn their own cash to keep up. This makes us uneasy. Many of us cannot shake the feeling that this initial "generally affordable" period of frontier model usage will not last. What then?
Something has got to give. These people and projects need more support.
That's where we come in...
We link donors to open source projects. Donations fund donated compute for over 30 leading agentic coding models. Token usage is public. Donors know their generosity went toward the projects they support.
When donations are received, capped compute keys provide maintainers with a fast, reliable stream of compute to fuel whatever will help them keep up.
They might use GitHub's Copilot CLI to manage GitHub issues and PRs, Continue to review and audit incoming PRs, or spend raw tokens for development and fixes through popular harnesses like Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, Mistral Vibe, or OpenCode.
Spend events roll back to the opub project page, so donor impact is visible in the project ledger. If a maintainer's agentic session starts through the opub open source CLI, compute usage is considered Linked: donors can see that spend was tied to the compute key and project session they funded.
Maintainers already have work that donated compute can help with.
A donor might want to help a project close stale bugs, review a backlog of pull requests, improve tests before a release, investigate a security report, ship a desirable feature, or modernize documentation. Open Public provides a way to do so by directly empowering the maintainers at the heart of the project.
We turn donations into compute: tokens, the juice, the fuel of agentic coding.
Through opub, the unit of trust is at the project level:
To correlate spend with the project, we do not need to observe prompts, responses, diffs, files, commits, or pull requests. It's a clean, transparent way to ensure the projects you appreciate and rely on won't fall behind the agentic flood.
Our goal is to amplify the health of the open source ecosystem. Any public GitHub repository can register now. To celebrate our launch and welcome project maintainers, the first 20 eligible verified projects with 100 or more stars get $50 in starter donated compute from opub.
After registration, connect a GitHub repository to receive your own Open Public project page. Projects outside the starter donated compute offer are welcome too: register, share the page, receive donations, and create compute keys once the project has available balance.
Our next mission? Find you some generous donors. To help, you can share your project page on social media, put it into your README, and point your community to it when people ask how to support the project. We'll do our best to surface projects and provide exposure wherever possible.
Once someone has donated to your project, you can create a key and securely apply that compute through leading models such as:
anthropic/claude-sonnet-4.6) anthropic/claude-haiku-4.5) openai/gpt-5.5) openai/gpt-5.4) openai/gpt-5.4-mini) openai/gpt-5.3-codex) mistralai/codestral-2508) mistralai/devstral-2512) minimax/minimax-m2.5) There are over 30 models at various costs, all served at their standard rates.
See the documentation for the full list of Available models.
After a project has available balance, a verified maintainer creates a compute key with a dollar limit. The limit is chosen by the maintainer and reserved from the project balance. Multiple active compute keys are allowed, so a project can keep setup flexible, rotate keys, or separate workflows without exposing unlimited spend.
Each key is shown once in the browser. After that, the secret belongs in the maintainer's local credential store or direct tool configuration.
The key can be used two ways:
Both paths spend from the project balance. The CLI path appends a Linked badge. That way, donors can see when compute was spent through a linked project session.
Session linking is not required, but it sends a strong signal to donors.
The opub CLI wraps the agent harness launch:
opub setup codex --project owner/repo --compute-key-id ck_...
opub run codex
opub setup stores the capped compute key in the system credential store and writes non-secret agent configuration. opub run starts the agent with the right credentials and refreshes a local, secretless MCP session for project context.
That session context can say which project, compute key, and agent were launched. It does not prove what the maintainer typed, what the model answered, which files changed, or which issue was fixed.
We do not and will not observe, train on, or collect prompts or prompt responses. Our method of session linking is open source and relies on MCP and agent-side skills to report session state. Donors get a useful public signal without turning maintainers' workspaces into surveillance systems.
The CLI supports popular agentic coding harnesses such as:
claude) codex) copilot) vibe) opencode) continue) The API key can also be used directly with OpenAI-compatible tooling. That path is unlinked, but spend still accrues to the project balance.
We're excited to see what the creators of our favorite projects can do with greater access to today's leading coding models. We know this isn't for everyone, and there's no pressure for project maintainers to register if they would rather not use agentic compute. But for those who are willing to use these new tools, we're excited to work with you to eliminate or reduce your agent-based costs.
This blog will publish content to help maintainers get the most out of donated compute, and profile the maintainers using it to build and refine the great things we have relied on in the past and will rely on tomorrow.
May no maintainer be left behind.
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