Hey HN! We’re Ioannis & Zaf, building Algora.io to help OSS projects reward their contributors & grow their communities.<p>1 min demo: <a href="https://twitter.com/algoraio/status/1641560954746839042" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://twitter.com/algoraio/status/1641560954746839042</a><p>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<p>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<p>Our solution: we built an app that streamlines open source bounties on Github<p>To date, OSS projects on the plaftorm have awarded $65,785 (600 bounties) to 188 contributors from 48 countries<p>Right now, 43 OSS projects (mainly Typescript, Rust & Scala) have made 242 bounties ($46,899) available to solve<p>To create bounties in your project, simply register, install our app in your repo(s) and use the /bounty command on issues<p>To solve bounties, submit a PR including the /claim command & connect with Stripe/Alipay to receive payouts<p>We also started a COSS founder podcast to share lessons & advice for building open source companies: <a href="https://youtube.com/@algora-io">https://youtube.com/@algora-io</a><p>We think it's now a great time to welcome new contributors & maintainers on the Algora platform - happy Hacktoberfest!<p>We are really excited to hear your feedback/questions and connect further: our emails are ioannis@algora.io & zafer@algora.io<p>Thank you!
It looks like a fine project, but you already did a Show HN. Please see <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html">https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html</a>.<p><i>Show HN: Algora – Paid open-source contributions</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35412226">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35412226</a> - April 2023 (70 comments)
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.<p>[1] <a href="https://github.com/drifting-in-space/y-sweet/">https://github.com/drifting-in-space/y-sweet/</a>
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.<p>I look forward to putting out many more bounties on Algora.<p>Edit: here's the link to our Algora page <a href="https://console.algora.io/org/teamhanko" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://console.algora.io/org/teamhanko</a>
We use algora at <a href="https://highlight.io">https://highlight.io</a> and love it:<p>1. We get OSS contributors incentivized to work on the features that we want to prioritize.<p>2. It acts as a great hiring funnel.<p>Congrats on the launch.
This is phenomenal. Even if your bounty gets scooped, you're working in public and therefore building valuable YoE with actual stakeholders.<p>Is there a limit to how low you can go? The lowest bounty I saw was $15.
We’ve been using Algora at <a href="https://trigger.dev">https://trigger.dev</a> 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.<p>Great product!
Great work.<p>Quick suggestion: Separate bounties with a "claim" active from the search for "Open Bounties".<p>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.
Love Algora!<p>Amazing both as a repo owner, but also as someone who has urgent issues in other repos.<p>The fact that you can add bounties to any issue on github is spectacular.
Review from a bootsrapped founding team:<p>TLDR we really enjoy Algora!<p>### Things to be aware of<p>- if you practice linear commit history then it is important to provide clear guidelines for that in your instructions on the issue<p>- 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?<p>- 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.<p>- 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.<p>### Weaknesses<p>- 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.<p>- 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.<p>- 9% fee is pretty brutal on the bounties<p>- Cannot pay bounty hunters in crypto<p>- There are a lot of Rust projects listed, but I still feel the hunters we worked with were not strong Rust programmers<p>### Strengths<p>- 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<p>- response times to bounties are incredibly fast<p>- Bounty hunters are global so work can get done on your repo 24/7
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.