A company can sponsor open source maintainers through GitHub Sponsors on behalf of its organization account. GitHub's documentation says organization sponsorships carry a fee of up to 6 percent, made of a 3 percent card processing fee and a 3 percent GitHub service fee. Invoiced billing avoids the card fee. Personal sponsorships carry no fees.
Who can receive money
GitHub says individual contributors to open source can receive sponsorship, including people who file bug reports, triage issues, write code or documentation, mentor, or manage projects, provided they live in a supported region. Organizations that contribute to open source and legally operate in a supported region can receive it too. Anyone can sponsor, but recipients must reside in a supported region, and those outside one can join a waitlist.
How payment works
Sponsors pick a tier and pay one time or monthly. The recipient sets the amounts and any benefits. You can sponsor from a personal account or on behalf of an organization, and sponsor several profiles in bulk. Payments use your account's existing billing date, payment method and receipts.
The fee picture
| Sponsor type | Fees |
|---|---|
| Personal account | None, the full amount goes to the recipient |
| Organization, card billing | Up to 6 percent (3 percent card, 3 percent GitHub) |
| Organization, invoiced billing | Avoids the 3 percent card fee |
The GitHub Sponsors Matching Fund is closed, according to the same page, so do not budget around matching.
Making it work inside a company
Finance and procurement often block small recurring payments to individuals. A few things help.
- Pick dependencies by exposure. Start from your software inventory and rank packages by how many of your products depend on them and how hard they would be to replace. An SBOM makes that list quick to produce.
- Use one owner. Give one team the budget and the approval path, so each payment does not need a fresh request.
- Prefer invoiced billing if you sponsor many projects, to cut the card fee.
- Pay for something specific if you can. Sponsorship is not a service contract. If you need a fix or a response time, a separate paid arrangement is the honest route.
What sponsorship does not do
It does not buy a security review, a patch deadline or a say in the roadmap. It also does not by itself make a project secure. Funding helps maintainers have time, and time is what most security practices need, but pair it with checks on the project itself. Our post on practices to look for is what OpenSSF Scorecard measures.
For a comparison of the different sponsorship models, see how sponsorship models compare. Safeguard's SBOM and dependency scanning can show which open source components your applications rely on, which is the starting point for deciding where to put money.
Quick check
Do individuals pay fees when sponsoring?
Per GitHub's documentation, personal account sponsorships have no fees, so the full amount goes to the recipient.
Sources
Last reviewed: 19 October 2026.
