GoToSocial, Knip, Mantine: three projects past $1,000 a month, and the crowd, the single sponsor and the corporate tier behind them

Three open-source projects ran above a thousand a month through 2026, and all three collected the money on a public ledger. What separates them is who sends it. GoToSocial is paid by 393 people, most of them a few euros at a time. Knip is paid by one sponsor. Mantine is paid by a table of sponsors: a dozen organisations at $200 a month and a hundred individuals below them.

Every figure below comes from a collective page or a transaction ledger, read on October 1, 2026. Open Collective publishes what a project raised, what it disbursed and a dated record of both, so the receipts can be counted month by month. A collective holds project money, and each case says where it goes.

What it is: GoToSocial is an ActivityPub server — software for running a small social-media instance of your own inside the fediverse — written in Go and built to run on a single-board computer or a five-dollar VPS. The repository lives on Codeberg, carries the AGPL-3.0 licence and 669 stars, and the project started in February 2021. 12

Public money figure: The collective estimates its monthly budget at €1,316, an annual estimate of €15,795.33, against €23,773.83 raised and €22,022.68 disbursed, leaving €1,751.15 in the account. 3

Monthly receipts: The ledger recorded €356 in September 2025, €705 in January 2026 and €361 in May 2026, then €1,284 in June 2026, €1,774 in July, €1,001 in August and €1,567 in September. 4

Who pays: 393 contributors on four membership tiers — €5 a month, €12 a year, a custom amount, and €100 a month. The largest givers are individuals: Jeff Moe at €1,500 since August 2023, an anonymous donor at €900, LittleFox at €860 and modulux at €716. The largest organisations are HTTP Toolkit at €280 since November 2022, Knowledge Work at €264 and Electromagnetic Field at €150. 3

The model: Sponsorship, sold as a repeating membership to the people who run the software. Open Source Europe, the Belgian non-profit that hosts the collective, takes 8% of contributions plus payment fees. 5

The trigger: The collective started paying its maintainers. The earliest €1,000 development payment in the ledger is tobi's, for the February 2026 work period, paid on 26 March 2026; kim was paid the same amount for the same period on 8 May, and the two have taken one €1,000 payment a month each since. 6 Monthly receipts passed €1,000 for the first time in June 2026, three months into that arrangement. 4

What the money buys: Two payments of €1,000 a month for development work, plus €226.44 a month to Greenhost for hosting. The collective's own stated goal is €8,500 a month for two full-time wages, about six times what arrives now, and the €1,751.15 balance is smaller than one month of the two payments. 36

It works when the people who use your software run it themselves. They already rent a server, so a €5 or €10 membership reads as part of the same bill, and 393 of them cover two part-time wages and the hosting bill, paid straight to the two maintainers.

It fails at the size of a salary. Two full-time wages at this rate would need more than a thousand members, and the balance, €1,751.15, is smaller than one month of the two payments.

What it is: Knip finds unused files, dependencies and exports in JavaScript and TypeScript projects. The repository is ISC-licensed with 12,392 stars, was first pushed in October 2022, and its site reports 40 million downloads a month. 7

Public money figure: The collective estimates its annual budget at $18,500, against $11,236.47 raised and $3,278.81 disbursed, leaving $7,957.66. 8

Monthly receipts: From September 2025 to April 2026 the collective took between $145 and $395 a month. May 2026 brought $1,045, June $45, July $6,045, and August and September $1,025 each. 9

Who pays: One account, alli-vercel, has paid $1,000 a month since 22 May 2026 — four payments totalling $4,000, and the only large repeating line in the ledger. Below it, Workleap has given $1,700 since December 2024 with its last payment in April 2026, STORIS $700 since July 2024 at $25 a month, and Mesh Payments $440 since October 2024, last paying in July 2026. On 18 July 2026 a single $5,000 payment arrived from Mocha, the JavaScript test framework, out of that project's own collective. 810

The model: Sponsorship on two published tiers, $5 a month and $100 a month, with a GitHub Sponsors account beside the Open Collective one. 1112

The trigger: The alli-vercel payments, which began in May 2026. A collective that had run flat at $145 a month for a year passed $1,000 in the month that sponsor signed, and the maintainer turned the new money into a program that pays other people.

What the money buys: $250 payments, most of them to contributors rather than the maintainer. The ledger's recent lines run $250 to changwan, $250 to Giorgio Boa for August contributions, $250 to trueberryless for June and July, $250 to David LJ for Angular plugin work, and $250 each to Abdullah Atta and Madeline Gurriarán as maintenance grants for fdir and tinyglobby, two libraries Knip itself depends on. 13

It works when one sponsor's bill is small next to the cost of your tool breaking. A single signature moved this collective from $145 a month to a funded program, and the money went to other maintainers, including the maintainers of two libraries Knip needs in order to run.

It fails as a personal income, and it is fragile. One account supplies almost the whole figure, and when Workleap and Mesh Payments stopped, their contributions left with them. The project's own sponsor page reports that across every channel the monthly average has been $828, and $464 with one-off payments excluded. 12

What it is: Mantine is a React components and hooks library, first released in May 2021 and now past 200 releases. The repository is MIT-licensed with 31,790 stars. 14

Public money figure: The collective estimates its annual budget at $17,594, against $20,637.77 raised and $16,078.95 disbursed, leaving $4,558.82. 15

Monthly receipts: The month's receipts first passed $1,000 in September 2025 at $1,147, rose to $2,341 in October, fell to $779 in November, and have stayed between $1,190 and $1,461 every month since December 2025. 16

Who pays: 128 contributors on two tiers: a $200-a-month sponsor slot that puts a logo on the project's home page and in the README, and a backer slot starting at $2 a month. The organisations carry it. Metabase has given $3,800 since February 2025, PropelAuth $3,400 since May 2025, N-iX $2,000 since December 2025, Followerhit $1,600 since February 2026, and Vial $2,000; among individuals, Medplum has given $2,800 and Brian $1,100, with the rest of the list sitting between $2 and $22 a month. 15

The model: Sponsorship with one priced corporate tier. $200 a month buys a logo on the project's home page and in the README, and the tier below it is a membership at $2. 17

The trigger: The corporate tier becoming load-bearing. Metabase joined in February 2025, PropelAuth in May 2025 and N-iX in December 2025, and the monthly total crossed $1,000 as that group assembled.

What the money buys: The maintainer's time, billed quarterly. The ledger shows four $4,000 payments to Vitaly Rtishchev for "Mantine Project Maintenance" — July 2025 for the first half of 2025, October 2025 for the third quarter, February 2026 for the fourth, and July 2026 for the second quarter of 2026. That averages about $1,333 a month across thirteen months, against income of $1,190 to $1,461. 18

It works when your users are companies and the ask fits a marketing budget. A $200-a-month logo on a library with 31,790 stars is a small line for a company whose product imports it, and the collective pays the total out to its maintainer on a schedule rather than letting it accumulate.

It fails at $2. Forty-two people hold the backer slot, and individuals in the ledger give between $2 and $22; the tier priced for a person raises less than one corporate sponsor does. The tier that pays here is the one priced against a company's budget.

Each annual figure is the collective's own estimate from recent activity, and it moves month to month.

Start from the payer you already have. GoToSocial's are the people running it, Knip's is the sponsor whose pipeline breaks without it, Mantine's are the companies that import it. Price the recurring cost each of them already absorbs, and size the wage to how many of them there are.