About sponsorships, fees, and taxes

About sponsorships

You can sponsor anyone with a sponsored developer profile or sponsored organization profile on behalf of your personal account or an organization. You can select from a range of sponsorship tiers, whether for an individual profile or multiple profiles in bulk, and choose between one-time or monthly payment amounts and benefits, all determined by the sponsored account.

Your sponsorship will share your account’s existing billing date, payment method, and receipt.

You can sponsor an account on behalf of your personal account to invest in projects that you personally benefit from. You can sponsor an account on behalf of your organization for many reasons.

• Sustaining specific libraries that your organization's work depends on
• Investing in the ecosystem you rely on as an organization (such as blockchain)
• Developing brand awareness as an organization that values open source
• Thanking open source developers for building libraries that complement the product your organization offers

We may share certain limited tax information with sponsored accounts. For more information, see Tax information.

You can choose whether to display your sponsorship publicly. One-time sponsorships remain visible for one month.

If the sponsored account retires your tier, the tier will remain in place for you until you choose a different tier or cancel your subscription. For more information, see Upgrading a sponsorship and Downgrading a sponsorship.

If the account you want to sponsor does not have a profile on GitHub Sponsors, you can encourage the account to join. For more information, see Setting up GitHub Sponsors for your personal account and Setting up GitHub Sponsors for your organization.

About billing and sponsorship payments

GitHub provides the following billing methods to show love and support to your fellow collaborators and developers in the form of paid sponsorships: debit or credit cards, and Patreon. For additional information on your preferred funding, please click on any of the links below.

• Sponsoring an open source contributor through GitHub
• Sponsoring an open source contributor through Patreon

Alternatively, enterprises and organizations may opt to be billed by recurring invoice. For additional information on billing by invoice, please click on Paying for GitHub Sponsors by invoice.

When an enterprise opts to pay by credit card, it can enforce policies within its organizations that allow sponsoring of open source contributors by payments from the same card that was used for billing. For additional information, please click on Enforcing policies for GitHub Sponsors in your enterprise.

Using the sponsorships dashboard for organizations

You can use the sponsorships dashboard to see an overview of active and past sponsorships. Organization owners can use the dashboard to see how much they are paying, make changes to sponsorships, and export their sponsorships as a CSV file. Non-members and people signed out of GitHub Enterprise Cloud can see public sponsorships and organization members can see public and private sponsorships.

You can access the sponsorships dashboard through your organization's profile.

1. In the upper-right corner of GitHub, select your profile photo, then click Your organizations.
2. Click the name of your organization.
3. Under your organization name, click Sponsoring.

Sponsorship fees

GitHub Sponsors does not charge any fees for sponsorships from personal accounts, so 100% of these sponsorships go to the sponsored developer or organization. GitHub Sponsors charges a fee of up to 6% for sponsorships from organization accounts. The 6% fee is split between the following:

• 3% credit card processing fee
• 3% GitHub service processing fee

Organizations can save the 3% credit card processing fee by switching to invoiced billing for sponsorships. For more information, see Paying for GitHub Sponsors by invoice.

For more information on fees and billing, see About billing for GitHub Sponsors.

Tax information

As a sponsor, you acknowledge that we may disclose to the owner of each account you sponsor the following limited information about your sponsorship payments to the account, since the inception of the Sponsors Program:

• Transaction date
• Amount paid
• The country, state, and province from where payment was made
• Whether payment was made by a business or individual

This information is necessary to enable payment and reporting of any taxes arising from such sponsorship payments.

Sponsorships are generally not tax deductible but can be in some cases. It's the responsibility of the sponsored open source contributor—not GitHub—to inform sponsors whether the contributions are being made to a tax-exempt entity like a 501(c)(3), and if the sponsorships may be tax-deductible.