[nevernude]

At this risk of some self promotion, we developed StackAid (https://stackaid.us) to help fund the long tail of open source because of the exact problems you mentioned. People only tend to remember the popular/direct dependencies.

[imiric]

This is a great project, thanks for creating it.

Am I interpreting it right, and your service acts as an escrow? Even though you seem to solve the payment headaches, I'm not sure I'd trust a middle-man to do the right thing in these matters. Would it be possible to use your tool entirely offline and just get a list of dependencies, and suggested payment per month for each depending on available funds? And then allow me to tweak it depending on whatever criteria I want, similar to the Humble Bundle sliders?

Getting the payments out to every project would be a hassle that you already solve, but I think it would be preferable to deal with those than with a centralized service that everyone depends on.

[nevernude]

Yes, we do hold payments for projects and pay them out monthly. However if you don't want to claim your funds on StackAid but do accept donations elsewhere, we will use those service to pay you out instead. Running the tool offline would be challenging because we a large index of dependency->repository mappings across various ecosystems so we can resolve your dependency tree. You would also still be stuck manually paying out to possibly hundreds of projects. FWIW we are completely transparent about the payments we make to each project as well as how much goes to us.