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Insiders¤

Some of my projects follow the sponsorware release strategy, which means that new features are first exclusively released to sponsors as part of Insiders. Read on to learn what sponsorships achieve, how to become a sponsor to get access to Insiders, and what's in it for you!

Current projects offering an Insiders version:

What is Insiders?¤

Insiders are private forks of my projects, hosted as private GitHub repositories. Almost1 all new features are developed as part of these forks, which means that they are immediately available to all eligible sponsors, as they are made collaborators of this repository.

Every feature is tied to a funding goal in monthly subscriptions. When a funding goal is hit, the features that are tied to it are merged back into the public projects and released for general availability, making them available to all users. Bugfixes are always released in tandem.

Sponsorships start as low as $10 a month.2

What sponsorships achieve¤

Sponsorships make this project sustainable, as they buy the maintainers of this project time – a very scarce resource – which is spent on the development of new features, bug fixing, stability improvement, issue triage and general support. The biggest bottleneck in Open Source is time.3

If you're unsure if you should sponsor my projects, check out the list of completed funding goals to learn whether you're already using features that were developed with the help of sponsorships. You're most likely using at least a handful of them, thanks to our awesome sponsors!

What's in it for me?¤

The moment you become a sponsor, you'll get immediate access to 13 additional features that you can start using right away, and which are currently exclusively available to sponsors:

How to become a sponsor¤

Thanks for your interest in sponsoring! In order to become an eligible sponsor with your GitHub account, visit pawamoy's sponsor profile, and complete a sponsorship of $10 a month or more. You can use your individual or organization GitHub account for sponsoring.

Important: If you're sponsoring @pawamoy through a GitHub organization, please send a short email to pawamoy@pm.me with the name of your organization and the GitHub account of the individual that should be added as a collaborator.4

You can cancel your sponsorship anytime.5

  Join our awesome sponsors



If you sponsor publicly, you're automatically added here with a link to your profile and avatar to show your support for my projects. Alternatively, if you wish to keep your sponsorship private, you'll be a silent +1. You can select visibility during checkout and change it afterwards.

Funding ¤

Goals¤

The following section lists all funding goals. Each goal contains a list of features prefixed with a checkmark symbol, denoting whether a feature is already available or planned, but not yet implemented. When the funding goal is hit, the features are released for general availability.

$ 500 — PlasmaVac User Guide¤

$ 1,000 — GraviFridge User Manual¤

Goals completed¤

This section lists all funding goals that were previously completed, which means that those features were part of Insiders, but are now generally available and can be used by all users.

Frequently asked questions¤

Payment¤

We don't want to pay for sponsorship every month. Are there any other options?

Yes. You can sponsor on a yearly basis by switching your GitHub account to a yearly billing cycle. If for some reason you cannot do that, you could also create a dedicated GitHub account with a yearly billing cycle, which you only use for sponsoring (some sponsors already do that).

If you have any problems or further questions, please reach out to pawamoy@pm.me.

Terms¤

Are we allowed to use Insiders under the same terms and conditions as the public project?

Yes. Whether you're an individual or a company, you may use the Insiders versions precisely under the same terms as the public versions, which are generally given by the ISC License. However, we kindly ask you to respect our fair use policy:

  • Please don't distribute the source code of Insiders. You may freely use it for public, private or commercial projects, privately fork or mirror it, but please don't make the source code public, as it would counteract the sponsorware strategy.

  • If you cancel your subscription, you're automatically removed as a collaborator and will miss out on all future updates of Insiders. However, you may use the latest version that's available to you as long as you like. Just remember that GitHub deletes private forks.

  1. In general, every new feature is first exclusively released to sponsors, but sometimes upstream dependencies enhance existing features that must be supported. ↩

  2. Note that $10 a month is the minimum amount to become eligible for Insiders. While GitHub Sponsors also allows to sponsor lower amounts or one-time amounts, those can't be granted access to Insiders due to technical reasons. Such contributions are still very much welcome as they help ensuring the project's sustainability. ↩

  3. Making an Open Source project sustainable is exceptionally hard: maintainers burn out, projects are abandoned. That's not great and very unpredictable. The sponsorware model ensures that if you decide to use my Insiders projects, you can be sure that bugs are fixed quickly and new features are added regularly. ↩

  4. It's currently not possible to grant access to each member of an organization, as GitHub only allows for adding users. Thus, after sponsoring, please send an email to pawamoy@pm.me, stating which account should become a collaborator of the Insiders repository. We're working on a solution which will make access to organizations much simpler. To ensure that access is not tied to a particular individual GitHub account, create a bot account (i.e. a GitHub account that is not tied to a specific individual), and use this account for the sponsoring. After being added to the list of collaborators, the bot account can create a private fork of the private Insiders GitHub repository, and grant access to all members of the organizations. ↩

  5. If you cancel your sponsorship, GitHub schedules a cancellation request which will become effective at the end of the billing cycle. This means that even though you cancel your sponsorship, you will keep your access to Insiders as long as your cancellation isn't effective. All charges are processed by GitHub through Stripe. As we don't receive any information regarding your payment, and GitHub doesn't offer refunds, sponsorships are non-refundable. ↩