Accelerating the GitHub Sponsors beta with Stripe Connect

Update: GitHub Sponsors is available in every country where GitHub does business, not just the 30 countries supported by Stripe Connect. We’ll continue to use our existing manual payout system for anyone outside of Connect’s list of currently supported countries.

Back in May, we announced GitHub Sponsors, a new way to support the developers who build and maintain the open source software you use every day. We launched in beta as early as possible so we could work closely with the community to address feedback and understand their needs before adding more developers to the program. Today, we’re taking the next step in accelerating the availability of GitHub Sponsors through a new streamlined onboarding and payment experience with Stripe Connect.

The early days of manual payments

Within hours of announcing GitHub Sponsors, thousands of people signed up for the waitlist from all over the world. It was awesome to see so much excitement for the program, but we knew this meant we had a lot of work ahead of us. 

We started the beta with a small group of sponsored developers, and every few weeks, we invited more into the program. Everything was a manual process—setting up account information, verifying identity, waiting for approval, running reports, and processing payouts across multiple departments. Due to the manual nature of the process, we were limited to a small number of people in the program until we could automate and streamline our operations.

Onboarding more developers, faster

At GitHub, we do business with companies of all sizes, from Fortune 50 companies to early stage startups from all over the world. Collecting revenue globally is something we’ve done for years, but with GitHub Sponsors, it’s not just about receiving money—it’s also about paying it out. This means providing a seamless and secure experience for sponsored developers to verify their identities, enter banking information, receive funds, and manage payouts. We also know that, for many maintainers, this will be the first time they’ve been financially rewarded for their contributions to open source. We want to ensure the process is easy for developers to complete, so they can spend more time doing what they love, like contributing to open source.

Stripe Connect Express offers a simple, low overhead onboarding experience that complies with web accessibility guidelines, coupled with the ability to localize the experience to simplify payouts in countries with unique tax laws and compliance regulations. And by not building our own onboarding solution, we’re able to save months of engineering and maintenance time, and start onboarding more sponsored developers today.

Localization

One of Stripe Connect’s features that’s helped us deliver a great experience to our users is their localization support. Stripe just released international support for 30 countries (with more to come) for Connect Express. With this expanded support, Stripe takes care of adjusting for localized rules and regulations for supported countries—no small feat. We couldn’t be more thrilled to be one of the first to offer support across all 30 countries to serve our global community.

Our maintainer onboarding process can now start to keep up with the growing demand of the program. With Stripe, users can onboard using Connect Express, reducing onboarding time from a week-long process to under five minutes.  

And there’s much more to come. While we’re just under four months into the program, we’re focused on making GitHub Sponsors available to even more developers around the world.

Sign up to join the beta—you’ll hear from us soon.

Learn more about GitHub Sponsors

Written by

Katie Delfin

@yassskatie