Cleat is built by one person on nights and weekends. Sponsorship turns part-time work into full-time work, and full-time work is how alpha software becomes infrastructure people trust. Every dollar goes back into the language.
Open source has a quiet failure mode: the maintainer gets a real job, the project goes silent, the people who depended on it go scrambling. Sponsorship is how you avoid that with Cleat.
If a meaningful number of people fund Cleat at $25–$100/month, Jayden can spend full days on the compiler instead of an hour at midnight. That means faster releases, faster bug fixes, real responsiveness to issues, and a roadmap that gets executed instead of just talked about.
Cleat will always be MIT-licensed and free to use. Sponsorship buys speed and stability, not access.
Pick the one that fits. Cancel anytime, change tiers anytime, no annual lock-in.
No middlemen, no admin overhead. Every dollar funds someone working on Cleat.
Most sponsorship pages ask for money and don't say what it's for. We think that's lazy.
If you sponsor Cleat, 70 cents of every dollar goes directly to maintainer time — measured in hours of compiler work per month, not abstract "support." The remaining 30% covers running costs and rewards external contributors who help.
Once we hit $2,000/month in recurring funding, we'll publish a quarterly transparency report showing exactly where the money went. That's the threshold where part-time becomes full-time.
No sponsors yet — Cleat just shipped its public alpha. The early supporters get the first slots.
Patron-tier sponsors get prominent placement on the homepage, on this page, and in the README. Be one of the first six and we'll never bump you down the wall.
Backer-tier sponsors are listed here in the order they signed up. Joining early means staying near the top forever.
If yours isn't here, ping us on Discord or open an issue.
Yes. Cleat is MIT-licensed and that won't change. There is no premium tier, no closed-source compiler, no "Cleat Enterprise" lurking on the roadmap. Sponsorship buys maintainer time and stability — every line of code stays public.
The realistic answer: faster development. Each sponsor brings a small amount of maintainer time. Aggregated, they turn this from a side project into a real one. That's the unlock.
Tier perks are real but secondary. The main thing you're funding is the project's continued existence at a serious pace.
Yes. We support both GitHub Sponsors (with proper invoices) and Open Collective for companies whose finance teams can't process GitHub. For larger sponsorships or annual contracts, email [email protected] and we'll work out invoicing that fits your AP process.
Honest answer: you lose the money for the months you sponsored, the same way any subscription works. We commit to transparency: if maintainer time drops below a sustainable level, we'll announce it publicly and tell sponsors to cancel.
Cleat is alpha software built by one person. There's real risk. We won't pretend otherwise — sponsorship at this stage is a vote of confidence, not a guarantee.
Backer-tier sponsors get to vote in monthly polls on minor design decisions. Patron-tier sponsors get a private call each quarter to discuss their use case, and their priorities are weighted higher in roadmap planning.
That said: the language is opinionated and we'll say no to things that don't fit Cleat's design philosophy, even from sponsors. The bar for inclusion is "does this make Cleat better for everyone," not "did the sponsor ask for it."
It's the floor where Jayden could meaningfully reduce contract work and devote serious daytime hours to Cleat. It's not a salary — it's the buffer that makes "I can ignore one client this week to ship a release" possible.
The next milestone after that is $8,000/month, which is roughly the threshold for Cleat to become a primary income source rather than a supplement.
Money is one form of support. Several others move the needle just as much.
Genuinely helps with discoverability. Free, takes one click, statistically meaningful.
A blog post, a tweet, a "what I built with Cleat" thread. Word-of-mouth is everything at alpha.
Even if you only ship internally, real usage surfaces real bugs. File issues, send PRs.
Issues tagged "good first issue" are scoped for first-time contributors. PRs welcome.