GitHub Sponsors
- Free allowance
- Quoted: 'Anyone who contributes to an open source project and lives in a supported region is eligible to become a sponsored developer', and 'GitHub Sponsors does not charge any fees for sponsorships from personal accounts, so 100% of these sponsorships go to the sponsored developer or...
- Verdict
- caveatusable, with a named limit or an unprobed read path
- Cost
- no price stated
- Identity
- emailno card, phone required
- Binding limit
- noneno named constraint binds
- Evidence
- documented2 sources; a first-party page was read and the sentence quoted
- Freshness
- stale on 2026-11-22checked 2026-10-22 (live); stale on 2026-11-22
| Free tier | Quoted: 'Anyone who contributes to an open source project and lives in a supported region is eligible to become a sponsored developer', and 'GitHub Sponsors does not charge any fees for sponsorships from personal accounts, so 100% of these sponsorships go to the sponsored developer or organization' (organisations pay up to 6 percent). unit none; metered on wall-clock; cash-passthrough |
|---|---|
| Price | none stated |
| Binding | none No vendor cap binds: the limit is whether a sponsor exists, and the amount is whatever they choose, so the constraint is demand rather than a quota. |
| Identity | email a GitHub account plus residence in a supported region: 'Anyone who contributes to an open source project and lives in a supported region is eligible to become a sponsored developer'. The record's notes add a payout account as a second gate, which no evidence row quotes, and send unsupported countries to a waitlist rather than naming a document. No card, hold, phone number or ID document is stated in any evidence row: unknown. |
| Egress | not stated |
| Interface | unknown inferred from the tooling the provider documents; not probed |
| Tooling | not stated |
| Composes with | This is the payout pipe for two other records: the GitHub Secure Open Source Fund pays its USD 10,000 'via GitHub Sponsors', so a region GitHub does not support loses both the rail and the grant. |
| Reliability | no reliability event recorded |
| Notes | Recorded because it is the pipe rather than a programme, and because the widely repeated claim that GitHub matches sponsorships is false: the Matching Fund closed to new applicants on 2020-01-01 and the docs say so. The gate is a supported region plus a payout account, and the docs send unsupported countries to a waitlist rather than a date. The corpus already holds github-actions, github-codespaces and github-copilot records; none of them covers the payment rail, so this is a new fact rather than a duplicate. |
Evidence 2
| date | source | what it proved |
|---|---|---|
| 2026-10-22 | docs.github.com/en/sponsors/getting-started-with-github-spon | quoted the supported-region eligibility sentence, the 100 percent pass-through for personal accounts, the 6 percent organisation fee split into a 3 percent card fee and a 3 percent GitHub fee, and the note that 'Eligibility for the GitHub Sponsors Matching Fund has passed. Applications received after the January 1, 2020 deadline are not eligible' |
| 2026-10-22 | github.com/open-source/github-secure-open-source-fund | the fund is 'Powered by GitHub Sponsors' and pays maintainers through it, which is why an unsupported region blocks that grant as well as this rail |
More fields 1
{
"facets": {
"class": "payment-rail",
"free_tier_kind": "cash-passthrough",
"shape": null
}
}Unknown values 7
$.egress.meteredegress metering was not published$.egress.termsa source was read and is silent on this field$.interfacethe access interface was not established$.per_object_cap.statedthe field does not apply to this kind of offer$.reliability_notenothing of this kind was observed$.retention.statedthe field does not apply to this kind of offer$.toolinga source was read and is silent on this field