TL;DR: Keploy is starting a fund to support open-source projects and their maintainers, in alignment with and inspired by Sentry’s OSS Pledge initiative.
Why Start an Open Source Fund?
Our team is composed of open-source maintainers and contributors, our products are open source, and everything we do takes place in the context of our open-source community. Open source is not a marketing channel for us, it is the ground the whole company stands on, which is why giving back to it is not an afterthought.
There are many ways to give back to open-source projects, such as making high-quality contributions and filing detailed bug reports. But some work can only be done by project owners and maintainers, and that work, the reviewing, releasing, triaging, and long-term stewardship, is often unpaid and invisible. A fund is one of the few ways to support it directly.
Today, Keploy has over 5.2K stars, 850+ contributors, 900 forks, and thousands of contributions, all with the help, support, and love of the open-source community.
With the Keploy OSS Fund, our goal is to help establish a precedent for giving early and often, and to reinforce the idea that sponsorship should be the norm rather than the exception.
Giving Back to the Community
Funding maintainers is not only about the specific projects we sponsor. It is about signalling that the people who keep open source running deserve support before they burn out, not after. Helping those who have helped us is the whole point, and we would rather build that habit now, while the company is still small, than treat it as something to get to once we are bigger.
Hiring From the Open Source Community
The first thing Keploy did with early funding was build out the team, and there was no better place to look than the open-source community itself. We hired some of the first and top Keploy contributors, Sarthak Shyngle, Charan Kamarapu, and Gourav Kumar, who formed Keploy’s founding engineering team. Contributing to open source is, among other things, one of the clearest ways to get noticed by the teams building the tools you care about.
How the Fund Works
We are starting the fund at $12,500 for the year, assessed quarterly since this is a new initiative. We are committed to giving at least this amount over the next year, and as we hire more developers the budget will grow with the company, keeping our contributions in sync with our size.
When choosing which projects to support, we applied two additional criteria:
- Availability on GitHub Sponsors: We are a small team of engineers looking to minimize administrative overhead. We have reached out to a few proposed projects that are not yet available via GitHub Sponsors, but for now this requirement excludes some candidates we would like to support in the future.
- Lack of conflicts: We avoided any conflicts of interest with projects connected to our own team.
The goal of this fund is to thank, encourage, and empower maintainers. Some maintainers offer additional features or support in exchange for funding, which we think is a fair model, but we want to keep this fund separate from our business needs. Any exchange for goods or services will happen in addition to this fund, never as a condition of it.
Who Are We Funding?
We are giving between $20 and $150 per month per project or maintainer. With these amounts, we are balancing the number of projects we can sponsor against a contribution that is actually meaningful to each recipient. The list will grow as the fund does.
What’s Next?
We have biased towards action by establishing this fund now, but the work is not done. We look forward to improving the process, growing the budget, and supporting more projects over time. And, of course, thank you to all the maintainers and contributors who keep the open-source community going. You are an inspiration to us.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the Keploy OSS Fund?
It is a recurring fund through which Keploy sponsors open-source projects and their maintainers, inspired by Sentry’s OSS Pledge. Its purpose is to support the maintainer work that keeps open source healthy but usually goes unpaid.
Why is Keploy funding open source?
Keploy is built by open-source maintainers, ships open-source products, and grew with the community’s support. The fund is a way to give back early and to help normalise sponsoring maintainers rather than treating it as an afterthought.
How does Keploy decide which projects to fund?
Candidate projects need to be available on GitHub Sponsors, which keeps the administrative overhead low, and must not present a conflict of interest with Keploy’s own team. Within those limits, the fund prioritises projects the team genuinely relies on.
How much does the fund give, and does it come with strings attached?
Keploy contributes between $20 and $150 per month per project or maintainer, starting from an annual commitment that grows as the company hires. The funding carries no obligation. If Keploy pays for specific features or support, that is handled separately from the fund.
