Folks saying this offer is in bad faith or not generous enough dont seem to understand how low the bar is here for rewarding maintainers.
I maintain Express.js and Lodash, as well as a number of express direct deps (as a TC member of both Express and Lodash).
OSS has been my fulltime focus for over a year (aka Im unemployed). In 2025 I made $10 from open source, in the form of an amazon gift card for fixing a bug in another random open source project (I think they have VC money).
Call it skill issue on my part, sure valid. But having a form that says “give us your email and handle, we can easily verify your contributions, and in exchange you get $200/month of value and we ask nothing of you” is the most generous gift Ive seen.
Is it enough to fix the well known power dynamics of OSS? Of course not. Is it cheap PR for Anthropic? Yes, as is every other corporate OSS fund initiative. Im not going to give them a standing ovation and a key to the city bc they cleared the extremely low bar.
My point is that, regardless of motives, from this maintainer’s perspective this is a kind offer which is respectful of me and my time. If you fall into the camp that training on OSS is stealing, I can see why youd think that this is a slap in the face. I personally do not see it that way, as my work is a conduit for me to serve millions Ill never meet, and what they do with my labor is not a personal concern. I do what I do because the process itself has value to me.
I might sign up just to stay on top of a market change that I don’t have an employer paying me to learn.
But the two concerns I have are, what happens when someone uses it to make the projects I work on again but with one design change, and it this pulling up the ladder behind us? Will someone still be able to start a project five years from now and do what you’ve done? Or come into existing projects like I have?
I dont want to misrepresent, I am not the original author of any of these projects. I am not JDD of lodash (who is still involved and part of the TC) nor TJ Holowaychuk of express.
I dont know what the future will look like, but IMO open source is the intersection of code and community (aka the squishy bits) and for that reason I dont think AI will make it obselete, not now nor in the future.
Just to reiterate
ANTHROPIC IS GIVING EVERY DECENTLY LARGE MAINTAINER $1000 WORTH OF INFERENCE (~x8 that in API prices)
They likely made a marketing budget for this of $1M or so
Other OSS stuff like Copilot or JetBrains costs to providers much less, $100/yr most (licenses are not expenses, only inference is)
Anthropic may get $500(average total for all 6mo) per user of just inference costs
6 months is because this is experimental and they have no idea what to expect
(their devrel department is meh as you could've noticed already), when they see it working they'll make it autorenew or something
ESR (Eric S.Raymond) asked OpenAI to match and got one, so the same offer from OpenAI will likely follow soon[tm]
I dunno, is a free trial really a gift? Especially if the thing they're trialing is built off the data you're giving them? To be fair it does have a pretty significant monetary value (which can't be transferred..), but personally it feels a little off
> I dunno, is a free trial really a gift?
To OPs point, whether you want to call it a gift kinda feels like splitting hairs. As is well established, most software companies have huge dependencies on OSS yet contribute very little so $1200 in free service is a pretty big step up over the fuck-all you'll get from most places.
I currently pay them $200/month out of my own pocket for this already, so for me it is not a free trial but subsizing my usage.
Agreed that $200 USD would be preferable (credits dont pay rent). My comment is directed at the strong words others have left about this being in bad faith on the whole. Even if it is, then their bad faith efforts are better than most.
Opinions here will vary, I wanted to share mine <3
> I maintain Express.js and Lodash
Thank you!
> In 2025 I made $10 from open source
Slightly off-topic, but I wish more OSS projects and maintainers would advertise cryptocurrency donation addresses. It's probably the easiest way for end users to donate.
I have done that for years, and so far have received the equivalent of $25 (through three mBTC transactions) on my Bitcoin address, and maybe $90 through whatever the token is Brave uses (BAT?).
I still get random donations through an old PayPal email address that's listed on the same page as my bitcoin address, and that totals more like $100 (a year, not over the lifetime).
Surely the easiest way is something like a PayPal/venmo link, no? I know a lot more people who use those than crypto.
What’s wrong with ko-fi?
ETH address 0x60F9CC1b97C78D8E8337Ef991a34bd8D9e600420 ¯\_(ツ)_/¯