Maintainer Stipends and Grants

Maintainer Stipends

Eligibility

The PL will notify quarterly the maintainers who have insufficient maintainer contributions for the prior quarter’s stipend.

The PL reviews those who are receiving the stipend for activity in mid-late December/March/June/September. The PL reviews those for AGM attendance expenses eligibility in mid-late December.

Maintainers will not receive the stipend for months where they are doing paid project work.

Amount and Frequency

The stipend is $300/month. We pay maintainers via invoice from the OpenCollective.

Invoicing and Getting Paid

To reduce administrative overhead, maintainers should set their invoices to recur once per quarter tagging the request with maintainer-stipend and submit them to the OpenCollective in the amount of $\$300 \times 3 = \$900$ USD.

Invoices must be filed during January, April, July and October for the preceding quarter. If previous invoices were submitted on a different schedule, please adjust the amounts and the new schedule accordingly.

Invoices must contain:

  • The date the invoice was created
  • A due date no less than 30 days after the creation date (NET30)
  • Your legal banking name
  • Your mailing address

  • A line item for each quarter you are owed, noted as

      Homebrew Maintainer Stipend, #{start_month}–#{end_month} #{year}

    and the amount of the stipend. If the invoice template you are using has a quantity field, simply use 1.

OpenCollective handles payment transfer, so ensure that you have enrolled in its payment system prior to submitting your invoice or payment will be delayed.

(Update this list if OpenCollective changes its invoicing requirements.)

Things to Know

Maintainers who sponsor Homebrew for any amount should consider canceling that sponsorship. We appreciate the historical support, but being an active maintainer is more valuable to the project. Moreover, contributing while receiving payment may complicate your taxes in some countries!

Stipend Program History

In November 2022, the Project Leadership Committee voted to pay maintainers a minimal monthly stipend via GitHub Sponsors. This was in an effort to utilize our accrued funds alongside paying for larger, individual development projects, such as the API installation improvements and CI runners.

In August 2023, the Project Leadership Committee voted to change the way we pay maintainers from GitHub Sponsors to quarterly invoices submitted through OpenCollective.

In December 2025, the Project Leadership Committee was replaced with the Lead Maintainers.

Maintainer Grants

Homebrew offers several grants to maintainers who are working to improve Homebrew. The Lead Maintainers authorise support for these categories of activities:

  1. Organising a maintainer hackathon
  2. Hardware expenses for maintaining Homebrew
  3. Travel to conferences
  4. Travel to the Homebrew Annual General Meeting

In accordance with the Expense and Reimbursement Policy, Lead Maintainers pre-approval is required. You can also contact a Lead Maintainer via Slack for presubmission enquiries.

The Lead Maintainers may also support ad hoc awards; if you believe that your proposed expense would advance Homebrew’s project goals these should be sent to OpenCollective to be approved by Lead Maintainers.

See Expense and Reimbursement Policy’s Getting Reimbursed section for instructions how to submit expenses approved for the following sections. Remember to tag the reimbursement request with maintainer-grant.

Maintainer hackathons

Maintainer hackathons can be organised to rapidly develop new features or otherwise improve the Homebrew project in ways that cannot be achieved via online collaboration. Hackathon proposals must have a single organiser that will be the point of contact for the Lead Maintainers. The organiser, in their application, should provide the following in a pre-approval request:

  • Well-defined goals that the hackathon will aim to achieve
  • List of (tentatively) attending maintainers and their departure cities
  • Proposed schedule with dates, location, and itemized budget

You can also contact a Lead Maintainer member via Slack for presubmission enquiries.

Organisers should, if possible, seek local sponsorships to offset costs of e.g. venue or equipment hire. Organisers should also budget for group meals for lunches and dinners to build maintainer camaraderie.

The Lead Maintainers will reimburse travel expenses for reasonably local maintainers. For example, reimbursement for hackathon travel between Australia and Europe is unlikely, but reimbursement for travel within Europe is acceptable. See the Expense and Reimbursement Policy’s Meals and Entertainment section on what meals may be covered.

All attendees will be expected to follow Homebrew’s Code of Conduct.

After the hackathon finishes, the organiser must provide to the Lead Maintainers a brief report on who attended and what was accomplished, with links to pull requests or other verifiable achievements.

Homebrew Hardware

The Lead Maintainers will reimburse reasonable purchases of hardware necessary to maintain Homebrew. To apply, a maintainer should submit to the Lead Maintainers for pre-approval:

  1. A brief summary of their history of work for Homebrew.
  2. A brief explanation of how the requested hardware is necessary for their work on Homebrew.
  3. A list of items to be reimbursed, with prices and applicable taxes.

Eligibility for hardware grant is also subject to the following:

  1. The maintainer must have been eligible for the maintainer stipend the last 4 quarters and been a maintainer at least a year.
  2. A maintainer can only apply for hardware once every 4 years.

Note that Homebrew should not be buying anyone a top-of-the-range MacBook. As-of April 2024, for example, you can buy 14” and 16” MacBook Pros with 18GB-128GB memory, 512GB-8TB storage and M3 Pro or Max CPUs. The best balance between cost and performance would be, at most, the 16” MacBook Pro with 36GB memory, 512GB storage and M3 Pro CPU. Regardless, the cost to Homebrew must be less than $4000 USD, maintainers are allowed to pay the difference if they insist on higher specs.

You can also contact a Lead Maintainer via Slack for presubmission enquiries.

Conference travel

The Lead Maintainers may reimburse maintainers who attend conferences that advance the goals of Homebrew. For budgetary reasons, maintainers who have support via e.g. their employer or the conference, are asked to use those funds prior to requesting reimbursement from Homebrew. The Lead Maintainers encourage maintainers to give presentations related to Homebrew; if you choose to do so, please acknowledge Homebrew’s support and share your poster/slides/recorded talk, where possible.

To apply for reimbursement of conference expenses, a maintainer must submit to the Lead Maintainers:

  • The name, location, and dates of the conference
  • The workshops, panels, or other events where maintainer attendance can benefit Homebrew
  • The title of the Homebrew-related presentation (if applicable)
  • An itemized estimate of conference expenses

As justification for attendance, the Lead Maintainers may ask the maintainer for a brief report on the conference, and how attending the conference has helped or could help improve Homebrew.

All travellers will be expected to follow Homebrew’s Code of Conduct, in addition to any policies that the conference itself may have.

Annual General Meeting

The Lead Maintainers will typically reimburse the expenses of active maintainers to attend the Homebrew Annual General Meeting. The Lead Maintainers will solicit applications via Slack yearly, around October. Maintainers who have not yet attended an annual meeting are especially encouraged to apply.

See Expense and Reimbursement Policy’s Getting Reimbursed section for instructions how to seek approval for travel and submit approved expenses.