I cannot recommend Bountysource - my first time using it, excited to contribute to some open source projects, I made a deposit and it was never credited. Reached out to Bountysource and they claimed they had no record of the fund transfer. Never received my money back despite proof of the transaction.

In 2018, Bountysource was acquired by "CanYa", a company known for their CanYaCoin ICO. As far as I can tell since the acquisition they have only gotten shadier (fair or not, I now associate them with sketchy cryptocurrency operations). Would not recommend.

I wanted to find a platform to fund open source development through bounties, but Bountysource isn't it - fortunately there are new alternatives popping up, hopefully more trustworthy.

There are a number of open source bounty sites documented on the FOSSjobs wiki:

https://github.com/fossjobs/fossjobs/wiki/resources#bounties

There's also https://issuehunt.io/ which seems to be the same idea.

Interesting... Yeah I didn't realize so many of these sites exist. Something seems to be preventing them (or especially one) to really gain prominence and name recognition.

My suspicion is that people contributing to open source don't really just contribute randomly. It is most likely that they use a library or repo and then they end up on the "issues" page because they had a problem themselves.

It's at this point where I would imagine one is most likely to convert into actually picking up an issue and when notice of a "bounty" might push someone over the fence (?)

Honestly, solving the problem is more of a push than any additional income. If there was a way to search for the bounty, maybe, but unless it's integrated into the project somehow, it's not worth searching out.

I keep telling myself this is something I'd enjoy doing - but then I do something to scratch my own itches instead and live without the bounty.

There's https://gitcoin.co/explorer, too, and it's always got new jobs posted and people doing them.

Came here to post this. I know some of the folks behind gitcoin and they've been pushing this effort forward for years.

Is this service ESCROW? It feels like 'number on the bounty' to 'actual payout' ratio may be not great otherwise.

Yes, at least for BountySource. To contribute money towards a bounty, you need to pay upfront and BountySource will hold the money in escrow.