FLOSS/fund 2026: $10,000 to $100,000 a Year for Free and Open Source Projects, Applied For With a funding.json File

FLOSS/fund 2026: $10,000 to $100,000 a Year for Free and Open Source Projects, Applied For With a funding.json File

FLOSS/fund is an open-ended pool of money for free and open source software, funded at $1 million a year and open to maintainers anywhere in the world. Individual projects can receive between $10,000 and $100,000 per year. There is no application deadline, no equity component, and no requirement to be a registered company or a nonprofit — an individual maintainer with a bank account is an eligible applicant.

The initiative comes from Zerodha, the Indian stock brokerage, which launched it in 2024, with the FOSS United Foundation as an ecosystem partner. The reasoning Zerodha gives is straightforward and stated on the fund’s own page: much of the foundation underlying modern technology and the internet itself is built on free and open source work, and comparatively little money flows back to the people maintaining it.

What makes this opportunity mechanically unusual — and worth understanding before you start — is that you do not fill in a conventional application form. You author a machine-readable funding.json manifest, publish it on your own website or repository, and submit its URL. That single design decision shapes almost everything about how you should prepare.

Key details

What the money is actually for

The fund’s stated target is “critical, impactful, and valuable” free and open source projects. In practice, that framing points at sustainability rather than novelty. The money is meant to keep work going that people already depend on: maintenance, security patching, release engineering, documentation, dependency upgrades, issue triage, infrastructure bills, and the unglamorous labour that keeps a widely used library from quietly rotting.

This is a meaningful difference from most software grants, which prefer to fund something new and demonstrable. Here the strongest position is the opposite one — you maintain something that a lot of people already rely on, and the funding lets you continue and stabilise it rather than start something.

The award ceiling of $100,000 per project per year, against a $1 million annual pool, tells you something about the intended shape of the portfolio. Even if every grant were made at the maximum, the fund would support roughly ten projects a year. The published record is consistent with a wider spread: the first tranche in May 2025 distributed $325,000 across nine projects, an average well under the ceiling. A second tranche followed in October 2025; the fund’s site notes it without publishing a per-project breakdown. Requesting the maximum is possible, but the disbursement history suggests that a proportionate, well-justified figure is the more realistic ask.

The increment rule is easy to get wrong and worth stating plainly: requests start at a minimum of $10,000, and go up in multiples of $25,000 thereafter. So $10,000, $35,000, $60,000, $85,000 are the shape of valid requests below the ceiling. A request for $20,000 or $50,000 does not fit the stated structure.

Who is eligible, and who is not

Eligibility is deliberately broad on the applicant side and deliberately narrow on the project side.

On the applicant side, the fund states that individuals, projects, groups, communities, or organisations can apply. You do not need to be incorporated. You do not need a nonprofit status, a fiscal sponsor, or an institutional affiliation. The only administrative requirement is that the applicant — whether a person or a legal entity — has a bank account and the necessary tax documents for their jurisdiction, so that money can actually be transferred and accounted for.

On the project side, there is one hard filter, and it is the single most common reason an application will not go anywhere: very new projects or projects with minimal usage are not considered. The fund is not a startup grant or an idea grant. If your project launched last month, or has a handful of users, it does not currently fit, no matter how promising the concept.

An application may cover one specific project, or an entity that represents many projects and FOSS efforts — so a foundation, collective, or umbrella organisation maintaining a family of tools can apply as a unit rather than filing separately for each component.

The funding.json application: what it is and how to approach it

The application is a published manifest, not a form. The steps are:

1. Author a funding.json file conforming to the standard documented at fundingjson.org.
2. Publish it on your project website or in your repository, at a stable, publicly reachable URL.
3. Submit that URL at dir.floss.fund/submit.

The manifest is where you describe the project, its maintainers, its usage and reach, its channels, and the funding you are requesting and why. Because it is a structured document rather than a free-text essay, the discipline it imposes is factual: you are asked for specifics that can be checked.

Two consequences follow, and both are worth planning around.

First, your application is public. Once submitted, it becomes publicly visible on the public portal at dir.floss.fund. There is no private submission channel. Anything you put in the manifest — including your funding request and how you describe your project’s health — is readable by anyone, including your users and your peers. Write it as a public document, because it is one.

Second, the manifest lives with your project. Publishing funding.json at a stable URL means it is a durable artefact you maintain, not a one-time submission you forget. Keeping it accurate as your project’s usage and needs change is part of the arrangement, and it makes reapplying in a later quarter substantially less work.

Before you submit, browse the existing entries in the public directory. Because every application is visible, you can see exactly how funded and unfunded projects have described themselves. Very few funding programmes let you read the full corpus of prior applications; this one does, and not using that is a wasted advantage.

Review, timing, and getting paid

There is no deadline. Instead, an internal investment committee evaluates applications at the end of every quarter. The fund has indicated that it plans to broaden this over time to include community voting and an external FOSS committee, but the committee model is what governs decisions today.

Practically, the quarterly cadence means your submission date determines which review cycle you land in, and the worst timing is submitting just after a quarter closes. If your manifest is nearly ready near the end of a quarter, finishing it is worth the push; if you have missed the boundary, you have a full quarter to strengthen the underlying evidence rather than rush.

Decisions are communicated by email. On acceptance, the team collects the necessary paperwork — tax residency documents and similar — and the fund notes that paperwork and fund disbursement can take up to about four weeks. Budget for that gap. If you are planning to fund a specific block of maintenance work, the money should be treated as arriving roughly a month after the decision, not on the day of it.

What recipients are asked to do in return

The obligations are light and non-financial. There is no equity, no repayment, and no revenue share. The fund requests that recipients consider a public acknowledgement with a link back to floss.fund, and provides embeddable badges for project websites and READMEs.

The word “requests” is the operative one — this is framed as a courtesy rather than a contractual condition. But it is a reasonable thing to honour, and adding the badge costs nothing.

How to make a strong case

Given the fund’s explicit sustainability framing and its usage filter, the evidence that matters most is evidence of real, current dependence on your work. Concretely, that means being able to show things like download or install counts, the number and identity of downstream projects that depend on you, release and commit history, issue and pull request volume, and the size and activity of your maintainer group.

A few positioning points that follow directly from the fund’s stated criteria:

• Lead with usage, not vision. The filter is on minimal usage, so demonstrating reach is the threshold question. Get the numbers into the manifest.
• Name the sustainability problem. The most legible case is a specific one: an unpaid maintainer carrying a critical component, a security backlog nobody has time for, infrastructure costs coming out of someone’s pocket, a bus factor of one.
• Justify the figure. Because requests move in defined increments, the amount you pick is a visible choice. Tie it to something real — a number of maintainer days, a concrete infrastructure bill, a defined body of work.
• Be honest about project health. The application is public and checkable. Overstating activity in a document that sits next to your public commit history is a poor trade.

Common mistakes

• Applying too early in a project’s life. This is the stated disqualifier, and no amount of polish compensates for it. If your project is genuinely new, build usage first and apply in a later quarter.
• Requesting an amount that does not fit the increment rule. Start at $10,000, then move in $25,000 steps.
• Treating the manifest as a formality. It is the entire application. A thin funding.json is a thin application.
• Publishing the manifest at an unstable URL. If the link moves or breaks, the submission points at nothing.
• Forgetting that it is public. Do not write anything in the manifest you would not want your users to read.
• Ignoring the four-week disbursement lag when planning work that depends on the money.

Frequently asked questions

Is there a deadline? No. Applications are rolling, and are reviewed at the end of every quarter.

Do I need to be a company or nonprofit? No. Individuals, projects, groups, communities, and organisations are all eligible. You need a bank account and the tax documents required where you live.

Is this open to applicants outside India? Yes. Although the fund is an initiative from Zerodha, an Indian company, it is aimed at free and open source projects globally.

Does the fund take equity or require repayment? No. These are grants.

Can I apply for several projects at once? An application can cover one specific project, or an entity that represents many projects and FOSS efforts.

Can I apply again if I am turned down? Nothing in the published guidance prevents it, and the rolling structure means a later quarter is always available. The productive move is to strengthen the usage and sustainability evidence first rather than resubmit the same manifest.

How much do projects typically receive? The fund has not published a formal average. The one detailed data point on its site is the first tranche of $325,000 across nine projects in May 2025, which works out well below the $100,000 ceiling.

Where can I see previous applications? Every submitted application is publicly visible in the directory at dir.floss.fund.

Official links and next steps

• Main site: floss.fund
• FAQ, including eligibility and process: floss.fund/faq
• Submit an application: dir.floss.fund/submit
• Public application directory: dir.floss.fund
• Manifest standard: fundingjson.org
• Zerodha’s open source page: zerodha.com/open-source

If your project clears the usage bar, the sensible sequence is: read the FAQ, read a dozen entries in the public directory to calibrate, gather your usage and dependency numbers, author and publish funding.json at a stable URL, then submit it with enough of the quarter left to land in the current review cycle.