Launching the Vite Ecosystem Fund

Cloudflare is distributing the first $301,300 of the Vite Ecosystem Fund to 44 projects and maintainers across the Vite ecosystem.

When VoidZero joined Cloudflare, we committed $1 million to strengthen the open source ecosystem around Vite. This round is just the start.

Sponsoring open source has always mattered, but now AI has made funding urgent.

AI is changing open source

AI has made open source more valuable while triggering more maintainer burnout. Previously, contributing to a project through either an issue or pull request meant you cared about it. In return, maintainers would review and provide feedback. AI changed the social contract of open source. Anyone can now create and submit AI-authored pull requests.

The most visible result is the influx of pull requests. As the number of PRs has gone up, the number of maintainers reviewing them has stayed constant. So each maintainer’s workload has grown.

During reviews, maintainers often find themselves speaking with an agent and not a person like they used to. If that’s the case, then why not cut out the middleman? Maintainers now have their own agents they can prompt to produce better results since they have more knowledge of the codebase.

AI has raised the pressure to produce. It’s made it easier for maintainers to ship features, performance improvements, and bug fixes that would not have been done otherwise. But it’s also made it easy for other projects to do the same. When another project adds overlapping features using AI, maintainers feel a need to keep up using AI. It can become a grinding cycle, where each project pushes the other to move faster. Along the way, some projects have grown in scope and lost sight of their original goals.

Maintainer burnout and sustainability have always been a problem — and now AI has accelerated those issues. That’s why sponsoring open source projects and supporting maintainers is so important in this moment.

One of the Vite Ecosystem Fund’s first recipients is e18e, a community focused on improving performance across the JavaScript ecosystem. Its lead, James Garbutt, has a long history in open source, and his work at e18e has helped make popular tools like Svelte, Storybook, and Nx faster. "Sponsorships make a huge difference and allow maintainers to dedicate more of their time to the things we all rely on," Garbutt says.

Fund distribution

The recipients of the Vite Ecosystem Fund were selected by a panel of core team members from Vite stack projects (Vite, Vitest, Rolldown, Oxc, Vite+), including maintainers not employed by Cloudflare.

The funding is allocated through Cloudflare's Open Collective as a combination of:

• Contributions to ecosystem recipients

• Stipends to core maintainers

We’re proud that Cloudflare has committed to making the open source ecosystem we rely on stronger and more sustainable. No project thrives in isolation.

We'll continue to distribute and draw down the committed amount every quarter.

Contributions to ecosystem recipients

This first round of sponsorships prioritized dependencies, ecosystem critical plugins, significant contributors, and projects that moved the ecosystem forward.

Andrew Gallant

Andrey Sitnik

Anthony Fu Fund

Artem Zakharchenko

Bart Waardenburg

Benjamin E. Coe

Brandon Roberts

David Ortner

David Tolnay

Denis Bardadym

Devon Govett

Divyansh Singh

Jessica Sachs

Jonas Kruckenberg

Máximo Mussini

Michael Cousins

Mickael Jeanroy

Misha Kaletsky

Mock Service Worker

Mohammad Bagher Abiyat

Nicholas Rayburn

Sindre Sorhus

typescript-eslint

universal-deploy (Vike)

Younes Jaaidi

Stipends to core maintainers

The core maintainers of the Vite stack are eligible for a stipend of up to $4,000 per calendar month. Each maintainer can invoice at a rate of $50 per hour contributed that month.

Any time spent improving or supporting the project in some way counts towards this stipend: writing code, writing documentation, triaging issues, offering support in our Discord servers, attending meetings or meetups, contributing to our upstream dependencies, and so on.

Maintainers who are already being paid for or employed for this work do not receive stipends — for example, VoidZero employees are ineligible.

Cloudflare supports open source

Cloudflare’s mission is to help build a better Internet. Supporting open source falls squarely within that mission. The Vite Ecosystem Fund is only part of it.

Cloudflare committed an additional $1 million to sponsor open source projects in our Community Engineers Fund. We also provide Cloudflare credits to open source projects via Project Alexandria.

The Vite ecosystem has come this far because of all the maintainers and contributors who came together to build a community. These sponsorships are a small thank-you for all this hard work.