[SOLAR_FIELDS]

It does seem like a worse version of a FOSS donation platform that uses regular old money. I guess one advantage is that you can ensure your money goes directly to using AI to solve specific problems on the codebase, but what does that solve? Are people genuinely worried that if they donate to some FOSS platform that their dollars would go to something else? It seems to me like this removes agency from the FOSS maintainer and gives donators more control over their donation, even though it's explicitly designed not to.

Its efficiency also relies on being better than whatever other platform/harness the maintainer is already using. It's limited to whatever the harness the platform provides, and they're taking a 20% platform fee on top. So I have to, instead of taking $10 from a donor, i take $10 worth of tokens, which may or not be spent more efficiently than me just going in with my claude subscription and fixing it, and I get $8 of those to run in a platform I don't control? In what world as a FOSS maintainer would I sign up for this? It just seems strictly worse than just having a platform that can back resolution of issues with real money... which already exists.

[zhubert]

Howdy Solar_Fields, these are great questions and I can give you my thoughts on how I feel it's different than cash donations (which are great if you can get them!). I look at this less like patronage and more an exchange of a resource to meet the needs of both parties. I want to support the projects I care about, some I'll give carte blanche, but some I have no connection to and really just want a bug fixed. Rather than fire up my own Claude Code and throw a PR at that maintainer, instead I'm saying, "hey, you know this codebase and can use this resource (tokens) better than me, please fix it with 'free' tokens." The platform fee is really just for AWS costs and is based on modeling, but I'm sure that's not the final form. Does that make sense?

[SOLAR_FIELDS]

Your reasoning is logical, but fails to pass the bar of "better than or even equal to just literally using some existing platform to attach a $X bounty to some issue I want resolved". There are several popular solutions that exist already to do that, your solution doesn't materially improve there, so what is the value add? It certainly gives the donor more confidence that the issue is being resolved in the way the donor wants it to, but if your problem is to make FOSS maintainer's life easier it doesn't move the needle in that direction, because it gives more power to already demanding FOSS users and less agency to the FOSS maintainer. And even if you solve that problem, does that value add cover a very-steep 20% platform fee?

I think it's a cool idea, don't get me wrong. But it has to be a very good solution to get adopted, like, it would have to significantly streamline the operations of getting bugs resolved by a FOSS maintainer, and I think it's going to be tough for you to try to beat "fire up my favorite agent in my terminal with an already optimized setup and give it this issue that has $X attached" rather than "I have perhaps inefficient token spend from a platform I have no control over and I have to take 20% less of a donation for that privilege"

In other words, I think you've built this solution for donors, and not FOSS maintainers, but really the bottleneck and problem and who you would be selling this solution to is not donors, but rather FOSS maintainers, and that's who you need to solve for if you want a platform like this to work. The donors have the easy job: they throw money at the problem to help it get solved faster. The FOSS maintainers have the hard job: They have to understand, accept the issue, propose a sensible solution, build it out, test it, etc. And your solution just makes it harder for those end users, because now they have two paths in their development workflow to getting issues resolved that they have to maintain, the non paid path and the paid path. So you're significantly increasing the overhead burden on these people and the material gain promised to those end users as the tradeoff is not convincing at all.