Take the 2023 open source maintainer survey!

Do you actively maintain one or more open source projects? If so, we'd love to learn from you.   

Our new maintainer survey aims to provide insights about the lived experiences of open source maintainers and give us a better understanding of the issues and challenges facing the entire open source ecosystem.

The data we collect will help Tidelift better support open source maintainers like you, amplify your voice and get you the resources you need to continue maintaining healthy open source projects.

We conducted the first maintainer-only survey in 2021 and learned a ton. Here are the top 3 most notable findings from the 2021 survey:

• Almost half of maintainers don’t get paid anything to work on their projects.
• Maintainers spend less than ¼ of their project time writing code.
• More than half of maintainers have quit or considered quitting.

We’re curious how things have changed since then. Are more maintainers earning money? And if so, how much more? Are the same things still driving you to keep maintaining? What is holding you back from doing your best work?

If you are already working as a lifter for Tidelift (or apply to lift a project and are accepted as a new lifter), we'll send you a limited edition Tidelift backpack (learn more about how lifting a project works here). If you are an open source maintainer not working with Tidelift, we'd still like to hear from you! Fill out the survey and get our latest Pay the Maintainers t-shirt. 

Your submissions to this survey are covered by the Tidelift privacy policy. If you are interested in the custom Tidelift backpack or pay the maintainers t-shirt, make sure to share your contact information at the end of the survey. If you are not a maintainer partner, we can only ship t-shirts to North America, Europe, and South America (we're sorry!), but we would still love to hear from you.