Telepresence is looking for sponsors

[thallgren]

Hi everyone,

I want to share some news about the project's future.

What changed

OpenAI has been Telepresence's main and only sponsor. That sponsorship has now ended. I want to thank them openly. Their support paid for one of the most productive periods in the project's history.

Where the project stands

Telepresence is used more than ever, with tens of thousands of unique installations every month.

Over the last year the project has moved well past the old commercial version. All of this is free and open source today:

• Personal intercepts with HTTP header and path filtering, so a whole team can share one cluster
• TLS/mTLS intercepts
• Wiretap, ingest, and replace modes for different ways of working
• Docker Compose integration and connect --docker
• Traffic-manager authentication and authorization, with RBAC grants and client-certificate support
• A node-hosted traffic-agent and an opt-in QUIC tunnel
• Guided setup with telepresence setup, plus an external control endpoint
• Signed installers for macOS, Windows (MSI, amd64 and arm64), and Linux packages
• An MCP server in the CLI

Several of these were paid features in the commercial version. Comparable tools still charge for them.

What sponsorship pays for

• Answering issues and discussions quickly
• Responding to security reports and CVEs, and shipping fixes fast
• Building the features you ask for
• Keeping CI, release signing, and the regression suite running across platforms and Kubernetes versions

None of this is going away tomorrow. But the project can't keep this pace for long without funding.

How you can help

• Sponsor the project: https://github.com/sponsors/telepresenceio
• Ask your company. If Telepresence saves your team time, a corporate sponsorship is likely a small cost next to that. I'm happy to talk about terms, recognition, and how sponsors can help shape the roadmap.
• Spread the word. Share this post, or tell us how your team uses Telepresence.

Thank you for using Telepresence, for filing issues, and for contributing. I'd love to keep building it with you.

Thomas Hallgren
Telepresence maintainer