Doubling Down on Open Source
We've doubled our open source pledge contribution to $14,000 ($3,500 per full-time engineer)
TL;DR: In 2025/2026, vlt is contributing $14,000 to open source projects and foundations equalling to $3,500 for each of our four full-time engineers. That doubles the $7,000 we paid in 2024/2025 (when we averaged about $2,333 per engineer). We're sticking with the Open Source Pledge alongside peers who treat investing in open source projects and maintainers as critical to our work.
What is the Open Source Pledge?
If you have not seen it yet, the Open Source Pledge exists to make paying maintainers a normal line item for companies that build on open source. The initiative sets a floor (today $2,000 per full-time developer per year) so that the statement “we use this stack” has a concrete counterpart in that now we can say “we fund this stack.”
We joined in 2024, with Sentry, Astral, VoidZero, Val Town, and many others showcasing how companies can make an impact when they give back - financially - to the ecosystem.
Why do we keep doing this?
Open source is not abstract for us: we ship it, we depend on it, and several of us have spent years maintaining and governing ecosystem projects (which you likely depend on today). Sponsorship does not replace contributions or participation but it does give maintainers stability and signal that downstream companies take the commons seriously. VoidZero’s note puts it well: corporate donations scale in a way one-off gifts from individuals often cannot, and normalizing that culture lowers the bar for the next company to say yes.
Yearly breakdown
| Year | Total | Avg. FTEs | Per engineer |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2024-2025 | $7,000 | 3 | $2,333 |
| 2025-2026 | $14,000 | 4 | $3,500 |
Headcount grew (although only +1), but our per-person dollars also went up. As a small startup we still want our total contributions as well as the per-engineer number to reflect just how critical we feel open source is to us as a company.
Where the money is going in 2025/2026?
| Logo | Amount | To | Why we sponsor |
|---|---|---|---|
 | $5,000 | OpenJS Foundation(Silver Member) | We love that OpenJS stewards a huge slice of the JavaScript ecosystem. Our team has contributed for years to Node.js but we also love & have relied on projects like ESLint, Electron, Express, Webpack, Fastify, nvm, and many more throughout the years. Membership is our way to back the neutral home these crucial projects & initiatives. |
 | $6,000 | npmx(Patron) | npmx is a strategic partnership we deeply value—we love what Daniel Rue helped kick off with a fresh look & browsing experience for the npm registry. Being a patron is how we back this collaborative effort & thriving community. |
 | $900 | pnpm | pnpm has pushed the whole package-manager space forward; we believe healthy competition—and real collaboration on shared problems—makes every client better. Sponsoring pnpm is part of that ethos & we hope to strategically align more as the years go on. |
 | $600 | Vite | We use Vitest in our website codebase every day, and we know that many in our shared user base rely on this tooling. Sponsoring Vite helps keep that development loop fast for us and the wider ecosystem. |
 | $600 | e18e | The e18e group has pushed forward many practical strategies to improve the status quo of our shared dependency ecosystem—less dead weight, clearer upgrades, and healthier defaults. Their work lines up with how we think about graphs, supply chains, and long-term maintenance. |
 | $600 | Alexander Akait(postcss-selector-parser) | postcss-selector-parser is what powers our Dependency Selector Syntax (DSS) parser - query selectors are at the heart of what makes our tooling special & unlocks powerful features for interacting with dependency graphs. Sponsoring Alexander keeps that layer sharp for everyone who builds on CSS selector parsers/tooling, including us. |
 | $300 | oxc | oxlint (from the oxc project) is how we lint this TypeScript and React codebase - fast feedback on every change. Sponsoring oxc is our way to pay that native-speed toolchain forward beyond our own repo. |
| $14,000 | Total | — |
We keep a live, up-to-date version of this breakdown alongside information on all our open source projects & contributions here.
How can you join the pledge?
If your company runs on open source (which we all know it does), consider joining the pledge at opensourcepledge.com.