Show HN: Algora – Paid open-source contributions

111 pointsby zcesurabout 2 years ago

Hey HN! We’re Ioannis & Zaf, building Algora.io to help open source projects reward their contributors & grow their communities.1 min demo: <a href="https://twitter.com/algoraio/status/1641560954746839042" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/algoraio/status/1641560954746839042</a>The problem: paid contributions in open source are scarce, low trust & high frictionOur solution: we built an app that streamlines open source bounties on GithubOur 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: <a href="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...</a>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: <a href="https://youtube.com/@algora-io">https://youtube.com/@algora-io</a>We are really excited to hear your feedback/questions and connect further: our emails are ioannis@algora.io & zafer@algora.io. Thank you!

21 comments

AlexITCabout 2 years 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.

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RobotToasterabout 2 years ago

>Algora charges a 23% fee over your rewarded bountiesThat 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.

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Met_Adeabout 2 years 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!

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preya2kabout 2 years 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!

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_queryabout 2 years 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 <a href="https://github.com/digitallyinduced/ihp/issues/1621">https://github.com/digitallyinduced/ihp/issues/1621</a> 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! :)

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KomoDabout 2 years ago

I keep reading it as Algolia

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mendorshikhabout 2 years 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!

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Maksadbekabout 2 years 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.

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alixanderwangabout 2 years ago

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

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raybbabout 2 years 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? <a href="https://github.com/nextcloud/tasks/issues/34">https://github.com/nextcloud/tasks/issues/34</a>

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techn00about 2 years ago

23% fee is way too much for this service

varunjain99about 2 years ago

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

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joshuapodabout 2 years 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 :)

Drunken_Founderabout 2 years 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.

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hankchinaskiabout 2 years 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.<a href="https://console.algora.io/org/golang-cafe/bounties" rel="nofollow">https://console.algora.io/org/golang-cafe/bounties</a>. willing to try now although i will only use it for small items, the fee is too high.

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iKlsRabout 2 years ago

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

Atlas22about 2 years ago

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

zicon35about 2 years ago

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

Peer_Richabout 2 years ago

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

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bakigulabout 2 years ago

Congratulations. it's great

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ZoomZoomZoomabout 2 years 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!

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