Open source grants, hackathons and bounties
56 open open source funding programs, each checked against the organizer's official page. 2 close in the next 7 days and 24 take applications on a rolling basis.
Money for people who write and maintain open source: foundation grants, security funds, maintainer stipends and paid contribution programs.
OpenStreetMap Community Microgrants 2026
OpenStreetMap offers grants of up to €500 for local community activities. Apply by 25 October 2026.
OpenCV AI Competition 2026, powered by AWS
The OpenCV AI Competition 2026, sponsored by AWS, pays $20,250 in prizes and compute grants for computer vision projects. Entries close on October 26, 2026.
BSSw Fellowship Program 2027
Up to $25,000 for a person who improves scientific software through a workshop, tutorial or community project. Applicants need a U.S. institution. Deadline October 30, 2026.
Foresight Institute AI for Science and Safety Nodes: request for proposals 2026
Foresight Institute offers grants of $30,000 to $100,000, compute and office space for open AI for science and safety projects. Proposals are due October 31, 2026.
Alpha-Omega open source security grants: October 2026 round
Alpha-Omega funds open source projects with typically $50,000 to $100,000 for security work. The next intake form is open from October 1 to October 31, 2026.
ARIA Scaling Trust grants
ARIA Scaling Trust offers grants from £100,000 to £3,000,000 for open source agent security tools. Proposals for this cycle are due 31 October 2026.
Tari October Build Contest 2026: Spooky Secrets
The Tari Council pays 1,000,000 XTM for the best new privacy project on Ootle. Entries close at 00:00 UTC on 1 November 2026.
Mergetober 2026 with Cognee
Mergetober pays a $5,000 prize pool for open source integrations to Cognee. Open a pull request by 31 October 2026.
Processing Foundation Fellowship 2027
Eight month paid fellowship with a $10,000 stipend to build open source creative coding tools on p5.js and Processing. US only. Nominations close 1 November 2026.
Wikimedia Rapid Fund 2026, Cycle 3: grants for small tech projects
Wikimedia Rapid Fund gives 500 to 5,000 USD for short projects, including small software tools for Wikimedia. Cycle 3 deadline: 1 November 2026.
ARC Prize 2026
ARC Prize 2026 offers $2M in prizes across three tracks for open source progress on the ARC-AGI benchmarks. Submissions on Kaggle are due November 2, 2026.
NLnet Foundation: open call for proposals with a November 3 deadline
NLnet funds open source and open hardware projects with first grants between 5,000 and 50,000 euro. The current call closes on November 3, 2026 at noon CET.
Open Science NL Open Science Infrastructure programme: second round 2026
Open Science NL will fund up to 1.7 million euros per proposal to improve digital infrastructure for open science. Letters of intent are due November 3, 2026.
ACLS Digital Justice Development Grants: 2026 competition
Grants of $50,000 to $100,000 for open digital humanities projects run through US universities. Applications close November 3, 2026.
Amazon Security call for proposals: Fall 2026
Amazon funds AI security research with gifts of no more than $80,000 on average, plus AWS credits. Proposals close 4 November 2026.
Fediverse Multimedia Grants 2026 by the Social Web Foundation
Grants of up to US$20,000 for developer and creator teams that start new audio, video or image publications on the Fediverse. Apply by 4 November 2026.
UNICEF Femtech Ventures 2026: second call for open source startups
UNICEF Femtech Ventures gives open source startups up to US$100,000 equity free and 12 months of mentoring for women's health tech. Apply by 4 November 2026.
UKOMAIN OMAIB Round 3 call for proposals
UKOMAIN funds up to £50,000 to build an open multimodal AI benchmark. Challenge proposals close 6 November 2026.
FreeCAD Grant Program 2026: Q4 round
Small grants from the FreeCAD Project Association for work on FreeCAD and its ecosystem. The last 2026 round closes on November 15, 2026, from a 40,000 EUR yearly budget.
Linux Australia Grants Program 2026
Linux Australia offers project and community grants from a $30k pool for open source work in Australia and New Zealand. Apply by 15 November 2026.
CHARTED Fund 2: Community Activities, 15 November 2026 deadline
CHARTED pays UK research software and data professionals up to £12.5k for community events, training and hackathons. Next deadline 15 November 2026.
Code for a Billion: Bharat Agentic AI Hackathon 2026
Code for India offers a ₹18,00,000 prize pool for open source AI agents that solve public problems. Submissions close 15 November 2026.
Prototype Fund class 03: applications open from October 2026
Prototype Fund class 03 funds open source prototypes with up to 95.000 € for teams. Applications run from 1 October to 30 November 2026.
OpenSats General Grant: Q4 2026 application window
OpenSats General Grants fund open source Bitcoin and nostr work for 3 to 12 months, paid in bitcoin. The Q4 window is open in October and November 2026.
Horizon Europe 2026: data sharing for AI foundation models in the energy sector
Horizon Europe grants of about €10 million each to build AI foundation models for the energy system on shared data. €30 million in total, deadline 1 December 2026.
NOSTRADAMUS Open Call #1 2026: open source farm data apps
Up to €50,000 for small companies to build open source decision tools for cereal farming on NOSTRADAMUS data. Five projects. Apply by 2 December 2026.
Open Science NL Mobility and Development Programme 2026
Open Science NL funds study visits abroad for Dutch open science professionals, up to €25,000. Apply in ISAAC until 3 December 2026.
Open Science NL Open Science Meetings 2026
Open Science NL pays up to €15,000 for meetings run by open science communities in the Netherlands. The call closes on 10 December 2026.
NSF PESOSE March 2027 deadline
NSF PESOSE funds US teams to plan, grow, or secure open source ecosystems, with awards up to $1,500,000. The next deadline is March 2, 2027.
tinygrad bounties for open source GPU and compiler work
tinygrad pays cash bounties of $200 to $2,000 for merged work on its open source deep learning framework, from GPU emulators to new backends.
Brink grant program for Bitcoin protocol developers
Brink awards year long grants to established Bitcoin protocol developers anywhere in the world to work full time on open source Bitcoin projects. Applications are open all year.
Google Patch Rewards Program for open source security fixes
Google pays $100 to $15,000 for patches that improve security in open source projects such as those in OSS-Fuzz. Rolling, no deadline.
Claude for Open Source: free Claude Max for maintainers
Anthropic gives open source maintainers and active contributors six months of free Claude Max 20x. Applications are open on a rolling basis.
Google Open Source Software Vulnerability Reward Program
Google pays up to $31,337 for supply chain compromises in its open source projects. Product vulnerability reports are paused since October 1, 2026.
Maelstrom Bitcoin Grant Program
Maelstrom pays Bitcoin developers 12 month grants of $50,000 to $150,000 in BTC, USDC or USDT. Applications are open at any time.
goose grant program
The goose grant program pays $100,000 for a 12 month open source project that builds on the goose AI agent. Proposals are reviewed on a rolling basis.
Omarchy bug bounty on HackerOne: up to $1,500
Omarchy pays up to $1,500 on HackerOne for bugs in its Linux distribution repository. The public program launched on 1 October 2026.
Proximity Prize: Ethereum Foundation research rewards for SNARK soundness proofs
The Ethereum Foundation Proximity Prize rewards solvers who raise machine checked security bounds for hash based SNARKs. Proofs are checked in Lean.
TheDAO Security Fund ETHSecurity Initiatives Round Two 2026
TheDAO Security Fund pays for Ethereum security work, with initiatives of $20,000 to $600,000. Round Two opened September 15, 2026 and ends in January 2027.
Tenstorrent Bounty Program for open source contributors
Tenstorrent pays bounties for merged pull requests on GitHub issues tagged bounty. Tiers run from $1 to $3,000, and one open issue lists $35,000.
Open Technology Fund Internet Freedom Fund
The Open Technology Fund gives $10,000 to $900,000 for internet freedom tools and research. Concept notes are accepted on a rolling basis.
Btrust Developer Grants for Bitcoin open source
Btrust pays Bitcoin open source developers in BTC to work full time, with six month starter grants and yearly long term grants. Applications are open all year.
FLOSS/fund grants for free and open source projects
FLOSS/fund from Zerodha gives open source projects anywhere up to $100,000 a year. Applications are open all year and reviewed every quarter.
OpenSats RED token reimbursement for Bitcoin red teams
OpenSats RED grants pay back LLM token and compute costs for people red teaming Bitcoin open source software. Always open, with fast review.
Vercel public bug bounty
Vercel pays up to $10,000 for critical reports in its public bug bounty, including open source projects. No deadline.
XRPL Glow grants
XRPL Glow pays retroactive grants for open source work already shipped on the XRP Ledger. Wave 1 is open.
FOSS United grants for open source projects in India
FOSS United gives grants of up to ₹15 lakh to open source projects and maintainers in India. Applications are open all year.
Clojurists Together quarterly fellowships
Clojurists Together pays Clojure maintainers $1,000 to $9,000 per quarterly fellowship, or about $18,000 a year, to work on their open source projects.
OpenAI Codex for Open Source programme
OpenAI gives open source maintainers six months of ChatGPT Pro with Codex and up to $25,000 in API credits from a $1 million fund. Applications are reviewed all year.
Hugging Face community GPU grants
Hugging Face covers the GPU hardware cost of selected Spaces. Maintainers apply from the hardware settings of their own Space and there is no deadline.
Sentient Foundation Open Source AGI Grant Programme
Sentient Foundation has committed $42 million in rolling grants and investments for people building open AI. No deadline.
Sovereign Tech Fund
Rolling funding from the Sovereign Tech Agency for open source base technologies such as libraries, package managers and protocols. Projects start at €50,000.
GitHub Secure Open Source Fund
$10,000 and three weeks of security training for maintainers of widely used open source projects. Applications are open on a rolling basis for every program session.
Sequoia Open Source Fellowship
Sequoia covers living expenses for 6 to 12 months so an open source developer can work full time on their project. No equity, rolling applications, 2 to 3 fellows a year.
Zcash Coinholder Directed Retroactive Grants: Q4 2026 round
The Zcash Coinholder Directed Retroactive Grants program pays for completed work on Zcash. The Q4 2026 call for proposals runs from 30 October to 13 November 2026.
Gem Fellowship 2027 for Ruby open source maintainers
The Gem Fellowship 2027 gives Ruby open source maintainers grants of $2,500 to $25,000. Applications are taken during December 2026.