Challenge

GitHub wanted to create a compliant and seamless onboarding experience that is accessible to the developer community in various languages around the world. Once onboarded, anyone on the Sponsors platform can effortlessly sponsor a developer contributing to an open source project.

Solution

GitHub chose Stripe Connect to get the Sponsors platform off the ground quickly and pay out developers around the world. GitHub was able to build fully localised onboarding flows for users looking to join from anywhere in the world directly from the Stripe dashboard. Since launching, GitHub has been able to expand to additional countries that previously had no developer support by leveraging Connect’s cross-border payouts.

Results

Connect reduced the onboarding process from a nine-step, weeklong process to a two-minute flow. GitHub Sponsors went from an idea to a functioning platform in just 2 months. Post launch, GitHub set up a waitlist for developers, with six thousand developers on the list in India alone. As Stripe doubled cross-border payout options in the past year, GitHub has been able to roll out to highly requested regions like Brazil, Indonesia and India, encouraging global open source contribution.

“We were able to expand to 38 new regions last year almost entirely in response to Stripe’s global expansion, making it possible to move thousands of developers off our waitlist.” said Emma Gabriel, director of product management for GitHub Sponsors.

Leveraging the power of Stripe's global reach

Stripe’s Global Payments and Treasury Network (GPTN) enables GitHub Sponsors to move money quickly, reliably, and programmatically anywhere in the world. That means taking payments from developers, paying out to other developers, and managing balances across a broad set of currencies and countries. For developers in Poland who sign up to receive donations, the flow they see will be fully localised: it’s in Polish and all the fields are what Polish developers would expect to see when entering their Polish bank details. By stitching together the world’s financial rails into a single platform, we’re trying to democratise access to them for developers and businesses around the world, and allowing companies like GitHub to move money further, faster.