Show HN: Algora – Open source coding bounties | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Algora – Open source coding bounties

console.algora.io

81 pointsirf136 comments

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

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

The context: contributing to open source helps developers gain experience, grow their networks & land jobs while helping maintainers ship product updates and push their projects forward for the whole community

The problem: there's too much work to be done in open source and not enough people contributing. Introducing payments can make contributing more accessible & benefit both sides, however today paid open source is scarce, low trust & high friction

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

To date, OSS projects on the plaftorm have awarded $65,785 (600 bounties) to 188 contributors from 48 countries

Right now, 43 OSS projects (mainly Typescript, Rust & Scala) have made 242 bounties ($46,899) available to solve

To create bounties in your project, simply register, install our app in your repo(s) and use the /bounty command on issues

To solve bounties, submit a PR including the /claim command & connect with Stripe/Alipay to receive payouts

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

We think it's now a great time to welcome new contributors & maintainers on the Algora platform - happy Hacktoberfest!

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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It looks like a fine project, but you already did a Show HN. Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html.

Show HN: Algora – Paid open-source contributions - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35412226 - April 2023 (70 comments)

hey dang, that was our first ever launch of this open source bounties platform and since then we proved out the concept, introduced many new features and grew the community.

I don't see how it's a dupe per the HN guidelines. could you please revise?

There are two relevant rules:

From the FAQ: reposts are considered dupes if the story has had significant attention in the last year or so - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

From the Show HN guidelines: feature upgrades are generally not sufficient for a new Show HN - https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html

Of course there's some grey area here (what counts as an incremental upgrade) but I think 6 months is too soon for this post. Sorry to disappoint, but users email us to complain about these things.

Oh and none of this is meant to imply that you aren't doing great work!

I used Algora for an issue for an open source project (y-sweet[1]) after bashing my head against the wall for 30 mins on it. It ended up being one of those “knowing where to hit the hammer” type problems and someone solved it in a matter of minutes with a 1 LOC PR. Money well spent.

[1] https://github.com/drifting-in-space/y-sweet/

Direct link to ticket: https://github.com/drifting-in-space/y-sweet/issues/78

As a COSS founder I love the visibility we get for the issues we put on Algora. We've awarded $855 to 7 external contributors so far and are more than happy with the results. The founder team is awesome - Ioannis and Zaf are great guys and a valuable asset to the open source community.

I look forward to putting out many more bounties on Algora.

Edit: here's the link to our Algora page https://console.algora.io/org/teamhanko

Same, we tip almost exclusively on algora

Documenso.com tipping open source contributors <3

thank you felix!! really appreciate your feedback on our call yesterday, we're working on the updates we discussed!

We use algora at https://highlight.io and love it:

1. We get OSS contributors incentivized to work on the features that we want to prioritize.

2. It acts as a great hiring funnel.

Congrats on the launch.

thank you so much jay! it's been a privilege to work with you

btw you have the most beautiful docs i've ever seen https://www.highlight.io/docs/getting-started/client-sdk/rea...

This is phenomenal. Even if your bounty gets scooped, you're working in public and therefore building valuable YoE with actual stakeholders.

Is there a limit to how low you can go? The lowest bounty I saw was $15.

We typically have not gotten success w/ bounties under $20

We’ve been using Algora at https://trigger.dev for a while now. Other than being great for bountying issues we’ve found it especially helpful for getting video walkthroughs of our onboarding created and improving our docs.

Great product!

thanks a lot james! you guys pioneered the video bounty use case, was so impressive seeing 10 videos submitted in just a single day!

https://github.com/triggerdotdev/trigger.dev/issues/249

Great work.

Quick suggestion: Separate bounties with a "claim" active from the search for "Open Bounties".

I spent last 15 minutes reading through the bounty and thread only to get to the end and see a claim was already initiated 4 days ago.

(algora cofounder here) thank you!

and sorry about that, can you send me a link to the bounty? the list on the homepage should already be sorted by availability

Just go to Home page, click PHP, then it is the 3rd result (#171 PR on OpnForm)

Looking again at it, it seems like maybe you are trying to show there is a claim on it by having a profile picture off to the right of it of the person with the PR active? But I have no idea how anyone would infer that readily.

duly noted, thank you for the feedback! you are right, can't infer readily, will fix!

Love Algora!

Amazing both as a repo owner, but also as someone who has urgent issues in other repos.

The fact that you can add bounties to any issue on github is spectacular.

https://algora.io/bounties/new creating bounties on other people's repositories is super neat indeed! however it's also tricky and we didn't get it right the first time.

these 'community bounties' are now by default shared privately with the maintainers only, and maintainers can decide to complete the bounties themselves, share them with the contributors, or discard them. That way community bounties are never intrusive to maintainers' time, roadmap & governance while also acting as a sponsorship if accepted

I like how bounties added by different people get pooled on the same issue!

Review from a bootsrapped founding team:

TLDR we really enjoy Algora!

### Things to be aware of

- if you practice linear commit history then it is important to provide clear guidelines for that in your instructions on the issue

- you should go into it with your own rules on how you will handle competing bounty solutions. Are you going to take the better one or the first?

- frequently you will need to cleanup bounty PRs. I.e. change from inline styles to tailwind, use middleware instead of inline controls on functions, etc.

- It is much easier to get bounty hunters when your project uses beginner friendly pieces like React/Astro. We have a lot of regret for going with SolidJS.

### Weaknesses

- I wish there was a way to boost the bounty for contributors that I know had already gotten the project to run locally. Some multiplier for them would be really nice.

- Similarly, I want to put a multiplier on a series of issues in a chain. So the first one is at 1x then second 1.5x, etc.

- 9% fee is pretty brutal on the bounties

- Cannot pay bounty hunters in crypto

- There are a lot of Rust projects listed, but I still feel the hunters we worked with were not strong Rust programmers

### Strengths

- the spend is getting work done and also marketing to some extent as the Algora bounty page will direct traffic to your Github and landing page

- response times to bounties are incredibly fast

- Bounty hunters are global so work can get done on your repo 24/7

> It is much easier to get bounty hunters when your project uses beginner friendly pieces like React/Astro. We have a lot of regret for going with SolidJS.

Can you say more on this?

> I wish there was a way to boost the bounty for contributors that I know had already gotten the project to run locally. Some multiplier for them would be really nice.

You can use the /tip command to pay contributors extra if you are pleased with their work.

> There are a lot of Rust projects listed, but I still feel the hunters we worked with were not strong Rust programmers

What was the average bounty amount on offer? Was it lower than $100? IME, low bounties tend to attract those looking to make a quick buck versus those who would like to stick around. I tend seek out contributions where the amount on offer is higher but usually this will mean a longer time committment on my part. I'm not a fan of being the first to submit a PR. I'd rather ask prodding questions to make sure we are on the same page before writing any line of code.

> beginner friendly pieces

React is much more ubiquitous and it seems like far more bounty hunters are proficient in it than newer and more cumbersome tools like Solid.

> /tip

Saying "we will tip you when you finish if you are X person" doesn't feel too great. The hunter has no guarantee they will get the tip, but also it's just a bad look on the issue. We would much rather have it built into the protocol. Generally we also want the gamification because we just think it's a nice way of boosting engagement.

> bounty amount for Rust

We had one at $200, but the rest were under $100 I believe. It's difficult beacuse "Rust" does not necessarily mean the issue is more difficult. Paying $100 for a 10 line PR just beacause it's in Rust doesn't feel great.

Amazing team and product solving a real problem.

Congrats on all the progress!

really appreciate it, thank you Jatin! best of luck with https://revert.dev & congrats for joining Git Round!

It's an interesting system but the reward of the bounties, specially when thinking of $/hour, makes me wonder what is the quality of the work.

can you create bounties for projects that you have zero affiliations with?

yes you can https://algora.io/bounties/new however the maintainers need to accept it first

Is it possible to sort by programming language?

absolutely! you can see https://algora.io/bounties/t/rust or https://algora.io/bounties/t/typescript

the in-app dashboard does the same based on your github profile

how do I find a list of all unclaimed bounties?

the list on the homepage is sorted by availability so all unclaimed bounties are at the top. you can further customize the sorting in-app!

Shelf <3 Algora

What's that?

https://www.shelf.nu

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