---
title: "Sponsoring Jekyll's development"
date: 2018-08-01 15:00:00 +0200
author: oe
categories: [community]
---

_(TL;DR: We're open for sponsorships on our [OpenCollective page](https://opencollective.com/jekyll))_

Hi Jekyllers,

As you may know, Jekyll is a completely free and open source project. We offer
our software and its related plugins and documentation at no cost because we
believe that good software should not cost anything. We're not planning on
changing that, but today I want to talk about a different monetary aspect of
open source.

Open source developers being paid for the work they do is a rare sight. Most
open source software is effectively the result of hundreds and thousands of
hours of free labor provided by individuals who are passionate enough to work
outside of their day job to create software that, ironically, is being used by
almost every company that offers digital services. It's a problem that has
gotten more attention in recent years, with the open source community becoming
more diverse and more and more companies actively investing in providing
monetary support for open source developers.

Jekyll has always been a product of volunteers. Rarely has someone been paid to
implement a certain plugin or feature. Today, we're excited to announce that we
will finally be able to fund our contributors! __We are opening an
OpenCollective to receive individual and corporate sponsorships__.
This is not unheard of, [Hugo](http://gohugo.io) is also funded by sponsorships,
as are many other similar projects, such as
[webpack](https://opencollective.com/webpack),
[Babel](https://opencollective.com/babel) or
[RuboCop](https://opencollective.com/rubocop).

OpenCollective is a service that makes it easy for open source projects to
receive funding from individuals and companies alike. It's specifically designed
for open source and many other projects already use it for funding.

Sponsoring is, for us, a method to finally realize some of the more ambitious
goals we've had with the project for years. The closest thing we want to realize
is to __release Jekyll 4.0, and to make it as polished as we can__. In the
future, we would also like to work on other things that will improve the Jekyll
ecosystem. Here's a couple of ideas:

- Create a comprehensive official plugin and theme directory site
- Improve tooling built around measuring and improving Jekyll's performance
- Improve maintenance for official plugins
- Including the community into official decisions; making Jekyll more friendly to folks in the community

Again, these are just some ideas, but with the help of sponsoring, they are now
one step closer to being realized :heart:

<div align="center" style="background-color: white;padding: 1em;">
  <a href="https://forestry/io"><img src="/img/forestry-logo.svg" alt="Forestry" /></a>
</div>

With that, we would like to announce our very first sponsor:
[__Forestry.io__](https://forestry.io)!
Forestry is a CMS that integrates with your Jekyll sites and lets you update
content using a beautiful interface, and then automatically commits it back to
your GitHub repository. We're excited to have them on board on a new, exciting
step of our journey.

Will anything change for Jekyll users? The answer is no - this step does not
impact the Jekyll software in any aspect. In fact, you might see positive
changes, such as more features and better performance. Surprisingly, that's what
happens when you properly fund people for their work!

If you have been a long time user for Jekyll and would like to give something
back to the project, you can consider a small monthly donation to our
[OpenCollective page](http://opencollective.com/jekyll). If your company heavily
relies on Jekyll, do consider sponsoring us!

Contact [matt@jekyllrb.com](mailto:matt@jekyllrb.com) and we'll figure something out together.

Thanks for sticking with us, and happy Jekylling! :tada:
