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Funding the OSS Stack: HTTP Toolkit & Open Source in 2025

February 2026Author: Tim Perry
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HTTP Toolkit, like effectively all software businesses, depends on a huge quantity of open-source code for much of its fundamental functionality & infrastructure. Most of this is tirelessly maintained by volunteers, completely for free! This honestly is a great deal for the businesses, but it would be even better if these maintainers were actually rewarded for their hard work.

As part of HTTP Toolkit's commitment to giving back to open source under the Open Source Pledge, a substantial chunk of revenue goes back into these open-source projects, to keep them healthy, reward maintainers for their tireless efforts, and encourage development on projects I care about to keep them moving forwards.

What does that mean in practice?

In 2025, httptoolkit paid $7,820 to open-source maintainers, taking the project's total past $20,000! Not bad for one person.

Open source has done a lot to power my tech education & career, and literally powers the foundations of HTTP Toolkit, so I'm more than happy to be able to support the upstream projects those depend on. None of these are earth-shaking amounts individually but cumulatively they add up, especially as other people and organizations add their own contributions in turn: OSS Pledge companies are now collectively donating nearly $3 million a year in total back to maintainers! If contributions like the above were expected behaviour from everybody building on open-source work, OSS would be a very different place.

Of course, this purely covers the financial contributions to open source. On top of that, all of HTTP Toolkit's own code is 100% open source, I personally maintain plenty of other projects (I'm one of the maintainers of Node.js, plus a handful of of smaller but popular libraries like loglevel) and there's been a long series of code contributions from HTTP Toolkit back to upstream projects along the way too.

If you or your employer are building software on top of open source, please give back to the projects you depend on and sign the Open Source Pledge. Even small amounts like this can make a huge difference to maintainers, and as more orgs get involved these collectively snowball remarkably quickly. Excited to see how much OSS Pledge can achieve in 2026!

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