The $100,000 Astro Ecosystem Fund

Astro is giving away $100,000 to support open-source projects in our ecosystem that improve the lives of Astro users everywhere, every day.

Astro is the web framework for building content-driven websites like blogs, marketing, and e-commerce. This new Astro Ecosystem Fund will award $10,000 grants to ten project maintainers over the next twelve months. Each recipient will receive a one-time grant to support and continue their work on behalf of the larger Astro ecosystem.

To celebrate the launch, our first three grant recipients are:

@pilcrowonpaper — for work on Lucia and Lucia + Astro middleware
Lucia is one of the most exciting JavaScript libraries in development right now, not just for Astro but the entire JavaScript ecosystem. Lucia’s focus on built-in, first-party support for Astro gives users a complete solution to own their own auth.
@ota-meshi — for work on eslint-plugin-astro
The Astro ESLint plugin has been downloaded over 1,000,000 times and provides essential support for linting .astro files alongside the rest of your project.
@Mike_Andreuzza — for work on Astro themes & templates
Michael (aka Lexington Themes) is one of the most exciting theme authors in the Astro ecosystem right now, with over 30+ free & premium templates already published to our catalog.

Funding comes from our own open-source sponsorship funds, collected and managed through corporate sponsorship and individual donations. We are thankful to our major open-source sponsors for making this possible: Vercel, Storyblok, Sentry, Netlify, Google Chrome, and more. Without their support, this initiative would never have been possible.

Interested in supporting our work? Sponsor us! 100% of funds raised are invested back into the community. Learn more about our approach to open-source funding on GitHub and browse our fully transparent project finances on Open Collective.

From $0 to $200,000

Astro operates as an open-source project. We follow an open governance model, an open roadmap process, and a completely open budgeting process through Open Collective. Our funding on Open Collective is made up entirely of sponsorships and donations to the project, which come from companies and some amazing individuals.

Two years ago we had $0 in our Open Collective. Today we manage an estimated annual sponsorship budget of $178,374.52 USD with over $200,000 in total funds raised, all from external donations.

Reaching this level of sponsorship didn’t happen overnight, and it didn’t happen accidentally. Our funding is the result of consistent effort and outreach to large sponsors over the last two years. It’s one of the less visible projects within Astro that I’m personally the most proud of.

Early on, a group of us also made the decision to form The Astro Technology Company. The company provides additional full-time resources to the project, which is another reason why we are able to reserve 100% of our sponsorship for our community of maintainers, contributors, and ecosystem builders.

We don’t take this unique privilege lightly. Initiatives like the Astro Ecosystem Fund let us leverage this fortunate position to also give back and support other, less visible open-source projects in our community.

Support open-source software

xkcd comic about open-source dependencies depicting a complex and barely stable structure made out of various sized blocks labeled as "All modern digital infrastructure". A small block seemingly integral to the building's infrastructure is labeled as "A project some random person in Nebraska has been thanklessly maintaining since 2003."

Open-source software is an essential part of the technical foundation that we all benefit from. Every company that uses open-source software to make money should contribute back their support in some way.

We are lucky to have sponsors who understand the importance of this. For example:

Google dispersed over $2,000,000 through their Web Framework & Tools Performance Fund.
Sentry recently announced a $500,000 total contribution to open-source software in 2023.
Vercel, Netlify, and CloudCannon all sponsor full-time development of popular open-source projects like React, Svelte, Solid.js, and Eleventy.

Nicholas Zakas (Creator of ESLint) has been a huge inspiration for us as well with his original writing and advocacy for a model of redistribution between open-source projects. Just because we are an open-source project ourselves doesn’t mean that we can’t also share our resources with other, less visible projects and maintainers.

The Astro Ecosystem Fund is us putting our money where our mouth is. Every Astro user stands to benefit from the work of these future grant recipients, and we’re proud to support them.

Get involved

More information about the Astro Ecosystem Fund — including instructions on how to nominate your favorite Astro ecosystem projects for one of our remaining $10,000 grants — will be available in early 2024. Join us on Twitter, Mastodon, or our Community Discord to stay informed and learn more about our grant recipients.

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