This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/opensource by /u/smi4lez on 2025-10-21 10:57:36+00:00.
We are Marie-Lena and Paul from Prototype Fund and our main goal is to support the open source community by funding open source developers and small teams. Ask us anything!
We provide up to 158.000 € for each project alongside coachings, networking and consulting. Our goal is to fund new ideas in the open source space and provide them with the resources needed to get to a prototype status - hence the name. We exclusively fund software projects in the public interest that are freely available, sustainably accessible and customizable as open source software.
Because developers want to code and not dig deep into bureaucracy, we try to be a low-threshold funding program. We therefore keep our application process as simple as possible: You only have to answer about 15 questions. But even the most simple process still begs some questions, so feel free to ask any of them.
We’re funding open source since 2016 and have funded over 400 projects so far (you can find them on our website and the code on our github) On the way, we also learned a lot about funding in general and have adjusted a lot. As a team of six people, we constantly work towards a better funding program. We love to answer questions about all that as well!
And of course, we deeply care about open source in general. So if you want to hear our thoughts on more broader questions, just ask them.
We cannot comment on or judge your project idea - we have a jury for that! We can only comment on if it generally fits into our funding scope.
We’re posting this a bit ahead of time, so you can think of questions. We’ll be answering them from 5 to 6 pm CEST (UTC+02:00). You can also upvote the questions you want to see answered first!
A big thank you to the mods for letting us do this!
[Edit 6pm] We have concluded this AmA for now - feel free to still leave comments and we might answer them in the following days.