15 ms·

Show HN: Algora – Paid open-source contributions

111 points by zcesur 4y ago

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 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%22%F0%9F%92%8E+Bounty%22+is%3Aclosed 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 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!

zicon35 4y ago
Happy customer here! Great job with the platform! :)
joshuapod 4y ago
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 :)
mendorshikh 4y ago
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!
- zcesur 4y ago
  thanks for your message & sharing your first bounties today, MJ - super excited to have you on algora!
Peer_Rich 4y ago
its great to offer bounties to our cal.com community!
- irf1 4y ago
  it's our pleasure to support the cal.com community, thank you Peer!!
bakigul 4y ago
Congratulations. it's great
- irf1 4y ago
  thank you Baki! great to have you on our platform :)
KomoD 4y ago
I keep reading it as Algolia
- zcesur 4y ago
  ha you're not alone. algora comes from the greek word αγορά (community gathering / marketplace) + the word algorithm :)
preya2k 4y ago
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!
- irf1 4y ago
  thanks so much for your kind words! really appreciate your input here. will stay focused :)
Met_Ade 4y ago
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!
- zcesur 4y ago
  <3 wouldn't be here without you guys. thank you so much!
varunjain99 4y ago
Congrats! I've always thought the bug bounty structure in security should be more prevalently applied to just building OSS software
- irf1 4y ago
  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!
Drunken_Founder 4y ago
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.
- irf1 4y ago
  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
  - pl90087 4y ago
    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.
Atlas22 4y ago
Great to see some more innovations in this space. What seperates it from bountysource or similar?
AlexITC 4y ago
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.
- irf1 4y ago
  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!
_query 4y ago
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 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! :)
- irf1 4y ago
  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!
RobotToaster 4y ago
>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.
- KomoD 4y ago
  Yeah, that's incredibly high.
- candiddevmike 4y ago
  A non commercial license would actually disqualify FLOSS projects
- scrollaway 4y ago
  It's far too high. The collectives in OpenCollective (https://opencollective.com/ 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 :/
  - irf1 4y ago
    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.
    - scrollaway 4y ago
      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.
techn00 4y ago
23% fee is way too much for this service
raybb 4y ago
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 https://github.com/nextcloud/tasks/issues/34
- irf1 4y ago
  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!
  - em-bee 4y ago
    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.
    - irf1 4y ago
      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
Maksadbek 4y ago
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.
- zcesur 4y ago
  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
  - Maksadbek 4y ago
    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.
    - zcesur 4y ago
      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?
alixanderwang 4y ago
Looks great! Giving it a try, posted a $220 bounty: https://github.com/terrastruct/d2/issues/921 https://github.com/terrastruct/d2/issues/921
- irf1 4y ago
  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!
- zcesur 4y ago
  PR merged! the bounty was rewarded to a new contributor <3
hankchinaski 4y ago
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 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.
- irf1 4y ago
  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!
iKlsR 4y ago
Interesting project, seeing this I wonder if anyone has ever scaffolded a base and just made tickets for other random people to implement.
ZoomZoomZoom 4y ago
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!
- irf1 4y ago
  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!
  - ZoomZoomZoom 4y ago
    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.

111 points by zcesur 4y ago

zicon35 4y ago

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

joshuapod 4y ago

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 :)

mendorshikh 4y ago

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!

zcesur 4y ago
thanks for your message & sharing your first bounties today, MJ - super excited to have you on algora!

Peer_Rich 4y ago

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

irf1 4y ago
it's our pleasure to support the cal.com community, thank you Peer!!

bakigul 4y ago

Congratulations. it's great

irf1 4y ago
thank you Baki! great to have you on our platform :)

KomoD 4y ago

I keep reading it as Algolia

zcesur 4y ago
ha you're not alone. algora comes from the greek word αγορά (community gathering / marketplace) + the word algorithm :)

preya2k 4y ago

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!

irf1 4y ago
thanks so much for your kind words! really appreciate your input here. will stay focused :)

Met_Ade 4y ago

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!

zcesur 4y ago
<3 wouldn't be here without you guys. thank you so much!

varunjain99 4y ago

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

irf1 4y ago
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!

Drunken_Founder 4y ago

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.

irf1 4y ago
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
- pl90087 4y ago
  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.

Atlas22 4y ago

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

AlexITC 4y ago

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.

irf1 4y ago
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!

_query 4y ago

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 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! :)

irf1 4y ago
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!

RobotToaster 4y ago

>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.

KomoD 4y ago
Yeah, that's incredibly high.
candiddevmike 4y ago
A non commercial license would actually disqualify FLOSS projects
scrollaway 4y ago
It's far too high. The collectives in OpenCollective (https://opencollective.com/ 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 :/
- irf1 4y ago
  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.
  - scrollaway 4y ago
    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.

techn00 4y ago

23% fee is way too much for this service

raybb 4y ago

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 https://github.com/nextcloud/tasks/issues/34

irf1 4y ago
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!
- em-bee 4y ago
  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.
  - irf1 4y ago
    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

Maksadbek 4y ago

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.

zcesur 4y ago
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
- Maksadbek 4y ago
  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.
  - zcesur 4y ago
    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?

alixanderwang 4y ago

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

irf1 4y ago
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!
zcesur 4y ago
PR merged! the bounty was rewarded to a new contributor <3

hankchinaski 4y ago

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 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.

irf1 4y ago
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!

iKlsR 4y ago

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

ZoomZoomZoom 4y ago

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!

irf1 4y ago
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!
- ZoomZoomZoom 4y ago
  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.