Cloudflare is distributing the first $301,300 of the Vite Ecosystem Fund to open source projects and maintainers. The recipients were chosen by a panel of Vite stack core team mem…
Cloudflare is distributing the first $301,300 of the Vite Ecosystem Fund to 44 projects and maintainers across the Vite ecosystem.
When VoidZero joined Cloudflare, we committed $1 million to strengthen the open source ecosystem around Vite. This round is just the start.
Sponsoring open source has always mattered, but now AI has made funding urgent.
AI is changing open source
AI has made open source more valuable while triggering more maintainer burnout. Previously, contributing to a project through either an issue or pull request meant you cared about it. In return, maintainers would review and provide feedback. AI changed the social contract of open source. Anyone can now create and submit AI-authored pull requests.
The most visible result is the influx of pull requests. As the number of PRs has gone up, the number of maintainers reviewing them has stayed constant. So each maintainer’s workload has grown.
During reviews, maintainers often find themselves speaking with an agent and not a person like they used to. If that’s the case, then why not cut out the middleman? Maintainers now have their own agents they can prompt to produce better results since they have more knowledge of the codebase.
AI has raised the pressure to produce. It’s made it easier for maintainers to ship features, performance improvements, and bug fixes that would not have been done otherwise. But it’s also made it easy for other projects to do the same. When another project adds overlapping features using AI, maintainers feel a need to keep up using AI. It can become a grinding cycle, where each project pushes the other to move faster. Along the way, some projects have grown in scope and lost sight of their original goals.
Maintainer burnout and sustainability have always been a problem — and now AI has accelerated those issues. That’s why sponsoring open source projects and supporting maintainers is so important in this moment.
One of the Vite Ecosystem Fund’s first recipients is e18e, a community focused on improving performance across the JavaScript ecosystem. Its lead, James Garbutt, has a long history in open source, and his work at e18e has helped make popular tools like Svelte, Storybook, and Nx faster. "Sponsorships make a huge difference and allow maintainers to dedicate more of their time to the things we all rely on," Garbutt says.
Fund distribution
The recipients of the Vite Ecosystem Fund were selected by a panel of core team members from Vite stack projects (Vite, Vitest, Rolldown, Oxc, Vite+), including maintainers not employed by Cloudflare.
The funding is allocated through Cloudflare's Open Collective as a combination of:
Contributions to ecosystem recipients
Stipends to core maintainers
We’re proud that Cloudflare has committed to making the open source ecosystem we rely on stronger and more sustainable. No project thrives in isolation.
We'll continue to distribute and draw down the committed amount every quarter.
Contributions to ecosystem recipients
This first round of sponsorships prioritized dependencies, ecosystem critical plugins, significant contributors, and projects that moved the ecosystem forward.
Andrew Gallant
Andrey Sitnik
Anthony Fu Fund
Ari Perkkiö
Artem Zakharchenko
Babel
Bart Waardenburg
Benjamin E. Coe
Brandon Roberts
Chai
David Ortner
David Tolnay
Denis Bardadym
Devon Govett
Divyansh Singh
e18e
ESlint
Giorgio Boa
Guy Bedford
Jessica Sachs
Jonas Kruckenberg
Luigi Pinca
Máximo Mussini
Michael Cousins
Mickael Jeanroy
Misha Kaletsky
Mock Service Worker
Mohammad Bagher Abiyat
Nicholas Rayburn
Paul Miller
Pig Fang
pnpm
Polka
PostCSS
Prettier
Ralf Jung
Rollup
Sindre Sorhus
Terser
typescript-eslint
Verite
universal-deploy (Vike)
Younes Jaaidi
Yuki Okushi
Stipends to core maintainers
The core maintainers of the Vite stack are eligible for a stipend of up to $4,000 per calendar month. Each maintainer can invoice at a rate of $50 per hour contributed that month.
Any time spent improving or supporting the project in some way counts towards this stipend: writing code, writing documentation, triaging issues, offering support in our Discord servers, attending meetings or meetups, contributing to our upstream dependencies, and so on.
Maintainers who are already being paid for or employed for this work do not receive stipends — for example, VoidZero employees are ineligible.
Cloudflare supports open source
Cloudflare’s mission is to help build a better Internet. Supporting open source falls squarely within that mission. The Vite Ecosystem Fund is only part of it.
Cloudflare committed an additional $1 million to sponsor open source projects in our Community Engineers Fund. We also provide Cloudflare credits to open source projects via Project Alexandria.
The Vite ecosystem has come this far because of all the maintainers and contributors who came together to build a community. These sponsorships are a small thank-you for all this hard work.