Show HN: Algora – Paid open-source contributions | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Algora – Paid open-source contributions

console.algora.io

111 pointszcesur70 comments

Hey HN! We’re Ioannis & Zaf, building Algora.io to help open source projects reward their contributors & grow their communities.

1 min demo: https://twitter.com/algoraio/status/1641560954746839042

The problem: paid contributions in open source are scarce, low trust & high friction

Our solution: we built an app that streamlines open source bounties on Github

Our 1st customer was Remotion.dev (15.6k stars, Typescript/React) in November 2022, whose feedback helped us ship our Github app & iterate through our bounty workflow. To date, Remotion.dev has rewarded 17 open source bounties: https://github.com/remotion-dev/remotion/issues?q=label%3A%2...

Since then, we’ve been fortunate to also onboard Cal.com (17.6k stars, Typescript/Next), IHP (3.9k stars, Haskell), Qdrant.tech (5.4k stars, Rust), erxes.io (2.8k stars, Typescript) and shuttle.rs (YC S20, 2.1k stars, Rust).

OSS contributors in the US, Europe (Germany, France, Norway), Canada, Nigeria, India, Egypt, UAE, Brazil, Colombia, Philippines and Australia have already earned bounties with Algora — we hope this list keeps growing!

We also started a COSS founder interview series to share lessons & advice for building open source companies: https://youtube.com/@algora-io

We are really excited to hear your feedback/questions and connect further: our emails are ioannis@algora.io & zafer@algora.io. Thank you!

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Congrats on the launch!

I see many potential use cases for this project:

1. As a developer, I have had customers paying me to contribute improvements to open source projects they depend on, this case is very tricky because there is no guarantee that the upstream project will accept the change.

2. As a company, we have had the need for some improvements to our projects that we don't have time for handling, a platform like this could have helped us.

On the other hand, I see some potential issues:

1. As a developer, it is hard to invest the time on a task when there is no guarantee for the payment, imagine I start investing 1 week in completing a bounty just to see someone else getting its PR merged before I finish mine, have you considered adding a locking mechanism? let's say, if I get the bounty assigned, I get up X time to deliver, otherwise, the bounty can go to someone else.

2. As a company, I'm not sure that many companies would be willing to commit to the 23% fee, maybe there is a way to structure this in a friendlier way? for example, taking a 20% fee up to $Y, even Upwork has a different % based on the amount paid by a company to a developer (staring at 20%, going up to 5%).

3. As a company, assuming a bounty can get locked to a dev, if I get many people interested in a bounty, how do I decide which one to pick? displaying historic data about devs could help.

In any case, good luck!

EDIT: I also haven't seen how a dispute would be handled, let's say, a dev sends a PR but a company rejected it but silently takes the code to use it. The inverse case could happen, a dev submitting low-quality work and demanding the company to pay.

fantastic feedback, thank you so much for all your input AlexITC!! regarding the potential issues you noted:

1. developers get assigned by the maintainers/core-team so there is no duplication of effort, there are never multiple developers working on the same bounty. if there's no progress from the assignee, maintainers / other developers would check in and the issue would get reassigned, there is self-regulation. that being said, standardizing this process through a 'locking mechanism' is an interesting idea, we will think it through - thanks!

2. the sliding-scale fee model you are suggesting is an interesting idea, we'll think it through! if companies try bounties, are satisfied and would like to commit to a bounties budget, at the moment we offer the option to pre-pay fees at a discount. there's definitely room for experimentation here, thanks for your note!

3. great point, at the moment you'd evaluate people by looking at their github profiles and whether they've contributed to your project before (or other projects in your ecosystem). there's definitely room to improve that 'selection' process for maintainers. once again great point!

> 1. developers get assigned by the maintainers/core-team so there is no duplication of effort, there are never multiple developers working on the same bounty

I have read the website docs again and I can't find any reference to this or how the process work.

As a company, I would hope to see more docs related to the business before trying it out, the docs assume that you are already integrating the bounties, there are even API docs (which are fine) but no clear definitions on dispute handling (these cases will occur sooner or later).

> 1. As a developer, I have had customers paying me to contribute improvements to open source projects they depend on, this case is very tricky because there is no guarantee that the upstream project will accept the change.

So far, my understanding is that this case is not supported, is there any plan for it? it is the most common I have been hired for.

Thanks.

we will update our docs accordingly about the assignment flow, thank you for noting this AlexITC!

regarding your last point, yeah this use case is very tricky, indeed there is no guarantee that the upstream project will accept the change. in fact, that project would need to have the algora app installed to begin with. that being said, we understand there is a pain point here, so we will note this down and seek additional feedback. we won't hesitate to reach out if/once there is a development here :) thanks so much once again for all your feedback!

Regarding point #1, I also launched something that is the volunteer idea of the OP, or just a journal with weekly themes of projects needing help, some AI related. Investing the time in this case is simply a volunteering or not decision.

[0]: (emacs week) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35413940

>Algora charges a 23% fee over your rewarded bounties

That seems, a little high, nearly a quarter.

>We also offer discounts to FLOSS projects (non-commercial license, no monetization).

That isn't what FLOSS means, FLOSS can still be commercial, usually by offering hosted solutions. I may be misinterpreting what you mean though.

It's far too high. The collectives in OpenCollective (https://opencollective.com/) usually charge 5-10%, and they take on a LOT of legal and compliance operations on top of the billing etc.

Indeed it's also not what FLOSS means.

Still, I wish you the best and hope you succeed, because a proper alternative to bountysource is welcome. But this leaves a bad taste in my mouth from the beginning :/

we're sad to hear you feel this way. not sure OpenCollective is an appropriate reference/comparison, but your point is duly noted.

in order to ensure we can continue providing value to the open source community, we need to make sure our own project is sustainable.

we are a bootstrapped startup without any VC funding and so we cannot cut corners when figuring out a sustainable business model. our current customers, who are all commercial open source companies, are happy with our pricing. and we're happy to accommodate non-commercial projects with discounts.

I absolutely would want your service to be sustainable. But a 23 percent cut of the bounties you offer is less “sustainability” territory and more rent-seeking territory. But maybe you don’t see this yet because your activity is low.

I say this as someone who tried to build something extremely similar years ago (Fosset, also bootstrapped). I thought I’d get away charging 30 percent, and it was both stupid and greedy. My cut should have been less than 10%, including payment processing fees.

I can see that you have very little cash coming in because despite some high profile clients (congrats on cal.com, love em), very few bounties are being paid out. But that’s a now thing, not a long term thing if you do things well. Your service should/would make it dead easy to support bounty setups and payouts.

A flow of 1k usd per day would net you today around 6k per month. That flow is basically nothing. A comparison point for you I think is codementor.io — small jobs with coding help (= dev centric community, focused on enabling payments for coding). They have about 20 jobs per day getting completed, at around 50-100 usd per job. That’s a flow of 1500 usd per day for someone who will be a far smaller player than you in the long term.

Your advantage is that you have a viral business model: you’re operating in public so the more people use you, the more you’ll get noticed. But you depend on open source projects signing up and that will be your bottleneck. And projects won’t sign up if a quarter of the cash goes to the landlord. If you do manage to get to cash positive with this cut you’re unlikely to ever reduce it; whereas if you start with a reasonable cut, you can still increase it potentially while grandfathering current users for a long period. And you’ll land more projects.

My advice: Lower your cut to 7.5 percent and focus all your effort on landing projects that have high intensity bug trackers and don’t move much money today. Make it so users can contribute bounties to issues and that a customisable public cut of the issue’s bounty always goes to the project maintainers (this will make it easier for maintainers to adopt). Make all this dead easy and you’ll move 10k per day in 2-3 years.

we actually don't take a cut off the bounty. rather, our fee is paid by the bounty creator (org) on top of the award.

contributors get 100% of the bounty :)

thank you for your feedback here and sharing your story!

Sorry, I sent early. That’s good for public optics but it doesn’t really make a difference, because it’s still money that disappears from the system.

I edited my post to make it more useful. Good luck, feel free to email me if you want to chat.

A non commercial license would actually disqualify FLOSS projects

Yeah, that's incredibly high.

if companies try bounties, are satisfied and would like to utilize them at a bigger scale, we offer the option to pre-pay fees at a discount for a bounties budget of their choice.

there's definitely room for experimentation here. that being said, we do not think the Algora 20% fee (+3% Stripe fee) is unreasonable, especially when we offer discounts upon request & are happy to accommodate non-commercial projects.

perhaps "non-commercial" (no monetization / financial backing) is a more appropriate term here?

No it's definitely unreasonable. It should be maximum of 5%, which is still high, but acceptable.

If I think in terms of rewarding open source contributors for the work they do, anything more than 10% (with that including credit card fees) feels extremely unfair, but if you think of it instead as providing effectively contractors for commercial projects that just happen to be open source, then higher percentages might be reasonable. I think it depends a lot on how you feel about what is happening.

Fairness is important. I've refused to use platforms because the cut seemed unfair before - it's one of the reasons I've had to stop buying kobo books through the android app- and I'm sure that's a common sentiment.

hey kybernetikos, appreciate your input here!

wanted to clarify that contributors get 100% of the bounty

our fee is paid by the bounty creator (org) on top of the award

Hey! We at Remotion are super happy to be Algora's first customer and found their solution to streamline open-source bounties on GitHub really helpful. It's awesome to see other great projects joining. The team at Algora is doing a fantastic job in continuously improving the experience to engage and reward our contributors. Keep up the great work!

<3 wouldn't be here without you guys. thank you so much!

I’ve been looking for something like this forever. Unfortunately all existing platforms are extremely shady and deal in Crypto/Blockchain. Please stay away from this and focus on what you’re doing now. I hope you’ll be successful with this project!

thanks so much for your kind words! really appreciate your input here. will stay focused :)

At IHP we've been using Algora for a while now and it works really great. Here's e.g. one PR that was merged last week with a bounty attached https://github.com/digitallyinduced/ihp/issues/1621 Everything was set up in less than 15 minutes and ioannis and zafer have been super helpful with any questions we had.

In general I think this is a good direction and an interesting take on the open question around sustainable open source. Congrats on the launch and keep up the great work! :)

thank you so much Marc!! super excited to have IHP on Algora, we love how the project streamlines web development in Haskell and helps new developers get started, really appreciate working together!

I keep reading it as Algolia

ha you're not alone. algora comes from the greek word αγορά (community gathering / marketplace) + the word algorithm :)

Congratulations on launching Algora.io! Your solution to incentivize open source contributions through streamlined bounties is much needed in the community. It's great to see that you're tackling the problem of low trust and high friction in paid contributions. I'm excited to see how Algora.io will help grow open source communities and reward the hard work of contributors. Best of luck with your project!

thanks for your message & sharing your first bounties today, MJ - super excited to have you on algora!

I can’t sign in on iPhone. The only option available to signup is by magic link. I receive the link and open it on gmail app then when I click it automatically opens in a sandbox Safari tab. As sandbox tabs are temporary, the cookie is lost when it’s closed.

hey Maksadbek, thanks a lot for reporting this! looking into it right now. in the meantime, you can hold down the button in the email to copy the magic link and paste into your browser

Hey! I already tried this. iPhones auto open links in mini window as a preview when holded. As a result, the copied link will be already expired.

oh i see, sorry about that. just deployed a new version with an additional link typed out in the email. can you let me know if that works?

Looks great! Giving it a try, posted a $220 bounty: https://github.com/terrastruct/d2/issues/921

Thank you so much Alex, welcome to Algora!! love the chess diagram in the Terrastruct D2 README ;) first Golang open source bounty, let's go!

PR merged! the bounty was rewarded to a new contributor <3

Am I understanding correctly that this only works in a flow such that the Org maintaining the project can create and pay bounties?

For example, NextCloud Tasks has an issue that is years old with hundreds of people asking about it and offering bounties but nobody has made it happen. Can this product help with crowdsourcing bounties or would NC have to be paying the bounty? https://github.com/nextcloud/tasks/issues/34

excellent question, thanks! correct, at the moment only Orgs create & pay bounties

crowdfunding bounties amongst users of OSS for features they'd like to see is a very interesting concept indeed and could help. however, it may also be a double-edged sword for the maintainers (ex users might feel 'entitled' with their requests now that money is involved, and this might happen on issues that are not part of the maintainers' roadmap).

we've been asked about this before, we don't yet understand all the dynamics here fully and refrained from developing, but it's a feature we can ship easily. we're holding back until a project explicitly agrees to have crowdfunded bounties in their repo and users who are ready to crowdfund it. happy to hear more feedback on this and continue the conversation!

crowdfunding could be handled in a way that organizations decide what issues/features to accept, like they would now, but instead of putting up a bounty from their own funds they say: we don't have the funds to pay for this feature, but if we get enough donations then we can pay someone to build it.

so instead of the crownd deciding what they want to fund, the organization puts up something like a kickstarter for that feature and then asks the crowd to chip in.

or put differently: now you only support bounties that are already funded, and these would be bounties that are not yet funded, and like a kickstarter they are waiting for supporters.

interesting. in this scenario, who would end up implementing the feature & earning the bounty? a maintainer, a contributor or either?

as noted above, the dynamics of this feature can be tricky, but we're open to give it a try once an organization is onboard for such an experiment and users / contributors have already voiced their intention to crowdfund in this way

really appreciate your input, thanks em-bee! happy to discuss further ioannis@algora.io

in this scenario, who would end up implementing the feature & earning the bounty

the same people that work on regular bounties.

once a bounty is funded through crowd-donations, the organization and the developers just treat it like a regular bounty.

effectively, what it comes down to is implementing a crowdfunding system.

i see three scenarios:

the current bounty means: we have money, but we don't have developers for this feature, so we'll put up a bounty.

then you have the case where: we have developers, but we don't have money, so we need crowdfunding.

and finally both together: we have neither developers nor funding for this feature, but if we can get this crowdfunded we can put up a bounty.

actually, crowdfunding would or could be independent from the bounty process because it is just a method to get funding. so it's even a question whether this is in scope of algora or should be something separate. i can see the advantage of having both in the same app because a crowdfunded feature could graduate into a bounty automatically: this bounty goes live as soon as the funding goal is reached,

but on the other hand this would also add complexity and maybe even confusion, because now you are dealing with three types of users: the organisation, the contributing developers and the financial supporters.

amazing receiving feedback like this, thank you for putting all this thought!

non-commercial open source orgs usually lack the budget for bounties, and so they'd miss out on this utility. we shipped a sponsorships feature in february (1min demo: https://youtu.be/cl-1tQaN-40) to eventually ameliorate this, but have kept the feature in alpha. it could be tied into the crowdbounties as you described.

we also think there can be an advantage to having both in the same app.

just taking it one step at a time.

would love to chat about this (cal.com/ioannisflo) & keep you updated (ioannis@algora.io) if you'd like, once again really appreciate your feedback on this!

regarding your sponsorship demo, i would expect the amount that i enter to be the total that i'll pay, because it is determined by the money that i have. the fees should not be added but subtracted from that amount. they also should be shown on the same page as the split to have a complete overview of where the money goes, not hidden as a surprise added on checkout. (hiding fees is actually illegal in the EU. i am not sure if this qualifies, but i'd be careful)

btw: consider a monthly (or other interval) repeat option

your feedback is duly noted, thanks em-bee! sponsorships are an experimental feature, not currently available, but if there's interest we will update it per your feedback before releasing, thanks again!

feel free to email me, my address is in my profile.

I help run a large open source org.

I'd be interested in using a service like this, but only if it offered a good way to crowd-source the funding for bounties.

Ideally we'd be able to accept proposals for bounties, and then have a Kickstarter-style mechanism for the funding, which is held in escrow and then released to whoever completes the bounty.

Feel free to email me if you'd like to chat more :)

hey alice, thank you for your message. leafwing-studios looks really cool!

we'd definitely appreciate your thoughts on this one, will email you :)

23% fee is way too much for this service

Congrats! I've always thought the bug bounty structure in security should be more prevalently applied to just building OSS software

couldn't agree more, why limit bounties to just bugs/security rather than apply them to OSS product development broadly. thank you for your input!

Hey team Algora, Kudos to you on building this to simplify OSS ecosystem. I believe this is a great solution to filter quality contributions and most importantly to find the right talent in OSS. All the best :)

What if the user who made the bounty suddenly changes his mind and decides not to reward someone who solved it and made a commit? how would you guys go on making sure that nobody does this, just curious seems like a cool idea though.

that's a great question, thank you Drunken_Founder! haven't experienced something like this. because everything is public, we think that acts as a deterrence for people to do what you described. in addition, we closely keep track of bounty activity, and so if we see that a bounty has been completed (per the spec/acceptance criteria) but not rewarded for a while, we'd reach out to the maintainers to check in. if we ever determine any foul play, it's only fair and reasonable to un-feature that org from bounty discovery on Algora and suspend their use of our app.

I hope this answers your question, thank you so much for your feedback! happy to follow-up here

I suppose that even covers a more intricate case: Somebody submits a PR, lots of discussions back and forth, lots of asks from the project, finally the submitter gives up since they don't want to keep spending time on things that start diverging from the original ask. After that, the code is there, the project eventually takes the code and integrates it themselves after little work. Or a lot of extra work.

What I'm trying to say is: The line could be blurry. The PR code quality could be crap and the project really needs to invest a lot of time to make this fit for merge, in which case they rightfully refuse the bounty. But it could be that the code quality is great and they are just trying to misuse this to make people do more than they originally wanted. And the difference between those scenarios could be hard to see for somebody external. Or even for the parties involved: The project could legitimately think that the code is not of sufficient quality while the submitter could legitimately think that they satisfied the request.

Who is the arbitter? Will people tend to accept the PR anyway (silently clean up and spend time afterwords), not wanting to risk their reputation? Or will submitters tend to accept major changes, possibly beyond the original ask, not wanting to risk their reputation? Seems a bit to me like a problem also faced by Airbnb and similar services.

As a consumer, within some definition of reason, I would be ok with taking "good enough" for $200 and then just doing another $200 for more work to improve on that, as it's own new distinct job.

At these levels it's not such a concern about getting stuck with a bad job. You just don't use that developer again and the $200 didn't wipe out your company.

I've commissioned jobs like that on freelancer sites for a lot more and pretty much did the same thing. Paid someone else to rework it or reworked it myself. I wouldn't use them again, but I did still get enough of what I needed and the job got done.

I guess it goes the other way too. Let's say I'm uncommonly generous and most other consumers will be much more demanding and try to get away with whatever they can. So the same thing as a provider. You get burned by one buyer for $200, you just don't service them any more but otherwise don't worry about the chance too much.

I see. How do you prevent them from submitting another bounty though? Should you warn them that next time you will not accept a PR? I mean, the wheel otherwise just turns one more time and you are back in the same seat.

I'm assuming you can see who is offering to do the job and select someone else. If that's not the case then you're right.

thank you for your input! the best way to ensure everyone has a great experience is to spec & scope bounty issues + provide acceptance criteria.

you can look at Remotion's 17 completed bounties, where specs & acceptance criteria are always included: https://github.com/remotion-dev/remotion/issues?q=label%3A%2...

that being said, we have only had a handful of projects using OSS bounties so far so we haven't seen everything under the sun. I acknowledge what you mean by blurry lines and how/when they might occur. but as I said before, when specs/scope/acceptance-criteria are in place, it's really hard to go wrong

Defining as acceptance criterion "must fit my style" is just not concrete enough..

where did you see that? not sure what you're referring to

i had exactly the same issue and was planning to build something like this before. glad i have found you. i opened a couple of bounties for my OSS project.https://console.algora.io/org/golang-cafe/bounties. willing to try now although i will only use it for small items, the fee is too high.

glad you found us too Diego! thank you very much for sharing bounties :)) always happy to get in touch and work something out, we wouldn't want our pricing to prevent you from enjoying the service! ioannis@algora.io welcome to Algora!

Interesting project, seeing this I wonder if anyone has ever scaffolded a base and just made tickets for other random people to implement.

Great to see some more innovations in this space. What seperates it from bountysource or similar?

Happy customer here! Great job with the platform! :)

its great to offer bounties to our cal.com community!

it's our pleasure to support the cal.com community, thank you Peer!!

Congratulations. it's great

thank you Baki! great to have you on our platform :)

You should bring the fact you're solely dependent on stripe for payments closer to the front page so you don't waste people's time registering.

Wish the project all the best!

with Stripe we support fast & secure payments for organizations, compliance, reporting and payouts to contributors in 118 countries

what's wasting people's time here? is there a specific alternative you'd like to see or?

thank you for your wishes!

Sorry I allowed my annoyance to seep through. I'm just allergic to bureaucracy and all that inevitable red tape you need to conform when trying to function legally across borders. The thing that got me is that even considering I've been moving between three countries lately, not one of them is in the list.

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