We just gave a million dollars to Open Source maintainers

The title is not a joke. For those of you who know Sentry, you know we've been giving back to Open Source maintainers since our early days in whatever ways we could. But around five years ago we really started to give in a more meaningful way. This year we increased our budget from $750,000 to $1,000,000.

Why? Well, we know the obvious value of Open Source software and believe the companies who use it should support the people who build and maintain it. Open Source software is like the ultimate cheat code – shared libraries, frameworks, and tools that have years of community support and development that we can use off the shelf and focus time on building other products, services, and businesses. Sentry benefits from this every day. Funding these projects and maintainers keeps the flywheel going.

LLMs have extended what we can build with these tools. But the AI stack also depends on Open Source. That's one reason why we added NumFOCUS to the foundations we supported in 2025 and continue to support this year too. (The more you know: NumFOCUS is a nonprofit that helps fund the Open Source scientific computing tools used in today's AI development.)

The Open Source Pledge

All this said, Sentry is not alone. This October marks the second anniversary of the Open Source Pledge, an initiative we started to help recognize companies who felt the same way we did and highlight Open Source maintainers. As of today, the Pledge's 37 member companies have paid a total of $7,421,535 to Open Source maintainers and foundations.

We also started the Open Source Pledge because, to put it bluntly, we don't believe in freeloading. Here's a little PSA on why you should join the Pledge.

Just two months ago in August, the Python Software Foundation (PSF) shared that its AWS spend had increased by ~69% from July of previous year. This shouldn't be a surprise to us because our prompt-engineered applications are driving more Python development, agents are installing packages, and more CI runs are all contributing to the demand on registries. The PSF also highlighted the need for more funding to grow the team operating this infrastructure.

Our ask: Consider giving back and join the Open Source Pledge, it's easy.

How did we distribute the $1,000,000?

We sent $495,000 to thanks.dev for them to distribute to hundreds of maintainers whose packages we use. Here's a table of recipients, updated as more maintainers accept our sponsorships. thanks.dev makes the process of funding dependencies simple, from scanning your dependency tree to handling the actual payments. This means there's no excuse to not pay maintainers, so your company should sign up to thanks.dev, too.

Then we used ecosyste.ms Funds to give $100,000 to globally critical packages across the Python, Django, Ruby, Rust, JS and Go ecosystems.

We've been keeping up to date with software supply chain research, so we know that the dependency trees provided by package managers have important blind spots: so-called phantom dependencies. To support all the maintainers we depend on, even those that are hard to find, we partnered with researchers from the Software Stewardship Lab to identify and pay dozens of Sentry dependencies that regular dependency analyses completely miss.

Of course, we're supporting Open Source foundations, too.

Name	Amount
Python Software Foundation	$60,000
PHP Foundation	$45,000
Ruby Central	$40,000
Django Software Foundation	$40,000
Packagist	$35,000
Open Source Initiative	$30,000
Rust Foundation	$15,000
Geomys	$15,000
OpenJS Foundation	$10,000
NumFOCUS	$10,000
Alpine Linux	$5,000

And the Syntax team also spent $100,000 of our budget to sponsor the following projects:

Name	Amount
antirez (maintainer of dwarfstar)	$5,000
biomejs	$5,000
coolLabs	$5,000
davidkpiano (maintainer of XState)	$5,000
dmno-dev (maintainer of varlock)	$5,000
donmccurdy (maintainer of Three.js)	$1,250
FFmpeg	$5,000
FLOSSAfrica Pool	$5,000
FreeCAD	$5,000
gnachman (maintainer of iTerm2)	$5,000
Jellyfin	$5,000
mholt (maintainer of Caddy)	$5,000
mrdoob (maintainer of Three.js)	$1,250
mswjs	$5,000
OBS	$5,000
pnpm	$5,000
Software Stewardship Lab's Burnout in Open Source Fund	$5,000
tannerlinsley (maintainer of TanStack)	$5,000
Tinchox5 (maintainer of SnapDOM)	$5,000
Vanilagy (maintainer of Mediabunny)	$5,000
webpro (maintainer of knip.dev)	$5,000
WestLangley (maintainer of Three.js)	$2,500

A big thank you to all you Open Source maintainers. We appreciate your work!