What is StackAid?

StackAid is the first subscription service to fund your open-source direct and indirect dependencies seamlessly.

Why?

Working on open-source software shouldn't be a choice between doing something you love or making a living. Open-source should be a career for more people, not just something you do when you get home. StackAid wants to remove the guilt of open source commits during daylight hours.

Funding open source beyond subsistence is good for business. Burnout of developers and maintainers leads to dependency churn, rewrites, and exploits.

How does it work?

StackAid searches for package manager files in your public and private repositories. StackAid aggregates all of your dependencies, then distributes your subscription amount among your dependencies -- this process is called allocation; more about that below.

Every open-source dependency has its associated repository. StackAid shows open-source developers how much money their repository has accrued, allowing them to claim the funds by proving they're a repository admin.

StackAid's allocation equally distributes your subscription among your first order dependencies, and those dependencies in turn distribute up to 50% of their share with their direct dependencies. See more detail and examples on the StackAid homepage.

Why does StackAid need access to my GitHub organization and repositories?

As a subscriber to StackAid, we analyze your public and private repositories for open source dependencies. A GitHub app is the most convenient way to keep your list of dependencies across multiple repositories updated within StackAid.

As an open-source maintainer, StackAid confirms you are a repository admin. As a repository admin, StackAid will distribute funds allocated to your repository.

What does the StackAid GitHub app access and store?

StackAid searches your private repositories for package dependency files such as package.json or stackaid.json. StackAid stores the contents in our database.

StackAid accesses organization members to see what repositories in an organization are visible to you when selecting dependency sources. This allows someone who didn’t install the GitHub app for an organization to access dependencies in the organization’s repositories.

StackAid verifies ownership of an open-source package by checking your permissions associated with the repository you’re claiming on StackAid.