Open source funding in 2025
(Still) investing in the software that makes Buttondown possible
A year ago, we announced our Open Source Funding Pledge, inspired by Sentry's Open Source Pledge initiative. Today, I'm excited to share an update on how that commitment has evolved.
You can see an itemized list of our commitments on our Open Source page, which lists all of the open source projects that we use — both those we're funding and those we're not (yet!).
What's new in 2025
This year, we've added two new open source tools to our stack:
| Tool | Description |
|---|---|
| Mise | Has become essential for managing our development environments and tool versions across the team. It's replaced a hodgepodge of version managers and made onboarding new developers significantly smoother. |
| Biome | A terrific new linter and formatter for our codebase. |
What's on the way out?
We've started to contract our overall supply chain, and with that we're phasing out some of the services we use—not because they aren't high quality, but because we want fewer moving parts. These are:
| Tool/Service | What's changing | Replacement |
|---|---|---|
| ESLint | Deprecated in our stack | Biome |
| HAProxy | Removed as an external proxy | Vercel's built-in proxy |
| Keystatic | Removed content/metadata management | Custom lightweight TypeScript schema |
| Just | Phasing out as a task runner | Mise |
| RQ | Gradually being replaced for job queuing | Our own Postgres-based job runner |
In addition, we've annotated the open source packages that are corporate-backed explicitly so as to differentiate them between completely community-led efforts.
Our funding philosophy
Our approach to identifying which projects to fund remains consistent:
- Bias against projects that are owned by for-profit entities, most of which do not accept sponsors anyway (Tailwind, Next, Tiptap, etc.)
- Bias towards projects that are particularly load-bearing to our business (Python, Django, Vue, etc.)
- Bias against "tip-jar" style donations of <$100/year in favor of being able to make slightly larger commitments that will hopefully be more impactful.
Django, Python, and Vue remain our largest commitments, reflecting their critical importance to everything we build. We've also continued to support smaller but essential projects like Structlog, Allauth, Anymail, and Homebrew.
Looking ahead
As we continue to grow, we're committed to scaling our open source contributions alongside our team. The $5,000 per developer per year framework has proven to be a useful guidepost, ensuring that our support for open source grows proportionally with our ability to give back.
If you're running an open source project that powers Buttondown and think we should be funding it, reach out! We're always looking to better understand the ecosystem we depend on.