Give Back Friday with PostHog
Nov 25, 2021
Black Friday is normally an occasion to shop around for a new TV or mobile phone. But we wanted to do something a little different, something to celebrate and support the open source community which we both rely upon and are proud to be part of. So, we're announcing our Give Back Friday campaign:
For every GitHub star we receive on the PostHog repo between starting Black Friday through Cyber Monday, we'll donate $5 USD across seven handpicked open-source projects.
We'll donate a maximum of $50,000 to these projects in total.
Who gets the money?
We're donating to the following projects, all of which are either used extensively in our website or product, or have been suggested for their daily usefulness to our team outside of work.
| Project | What is it? | Why we're supporting it |
|---|---|---|
| Rrweb | An open-source web session replay library. | Rrweb powers our session recording features |
| Graphile/Worker | A high performance Node.js/PostgreSQL job queue. | Graphile/Worker powers logic for our plugin server. |
| Django REST framework | Open-source web APIs for Django. | This powers the PostHog REST APIs. |
| KeePass | An open-source multi-platform password manager. | Keepass is used regularly by our team and was suggested by Joe Martin. |
| Piscina | A fast, efficient Node.js Worker Thread Pool implementation. | We run a fork of Piscina which powers activities across PostHog. |
| All-contributors | A tool to recognize community contributions to open-source projects. | We run a form of All-contributors to power our contributions bot. |
| Alex | A tool to detect insensitive or inconsiderate writing. | Alex is used by our team and was suggested by Paul D'Ambra. |
How does this work?
That's easy. Between now and the end of Cyber Monday, simply follow these steps:
- Login to GitHub and go to the PostHog repo.
- Click the ⭐️ icon. Hint: it's in the top right corner.
- That's it. We'll donate on your behalf!
On the morning of Tuesday, November 30th, we'll count up how many stars we've gained and contact the projects above to make the donations. We'll quickly verify the stars are legitimate (see small print below).
Why are we doing this?
PostHog is an open-source project and our team is all individually proud to be part of the open-source community. We wanted to take this weekend as an opportunity to truly celebrate and support the open-source community in a meaningful way. We don't do short-lived price cuts, as we don't believe it's the right way to build trust with our customers or a sustainable business in the long run.
We also wanted to involve our community too, which is why we've chosen to give donations based on GitHub stars. If you'd like to unstar us after we've counted your contributions, that's absolutely fine - we suggest just waiting until later in the week to be sure your star is counted towards the total. We previously had the idea of allowing people to directly donate to open source projects and we'd match them, but we felt this idea makes it a lot easier for our community to express their support this way, and counting stars is a straightforward way to keep track.
Finally, getting people who care about open source projects to star our repo is of course beneficial to us - it'll give us an opportunity to reach a relevant new audience of people who are likely to benefit from using PostHog. If we get enough stars, we may feature on GitHub Trending, which also helps us to reach a wider audience still.
Is there any small print?
Yes, some.
Firstly, there were two projects we chose not to support and which we feel it is important to be transparent about:
- ClickHouse: We use ClickHouse a lot. But we think they're OK for money right now.
- Kea: We use Kea a lot too, but it is run by one of our existing team members, Marius. He's fine with this, by the way.
Some other matters of small print:
- There's a maximum donation of $50,000 in total.
- The total sum of donations shall be divided equally between projects.
- Donations are at the discretion of PostHog and all decisions are final.
- Donations are in addition to our usual, ongoing open-source sponsorship.
That's it.
Support the projects that make PostHog possible by heading to the PostHog repo and starring it today! We'll donate $5 for every star between now and the end of Cyber Monday!