from Hacker News

Show HN: Algora – Open source coding bounties

by irf1 on 10/4/23, 6:34 PM with 36 comments

• by dang on 10/4/23, 8:32 PM

  It looks like a fine project, but you already did a Show HN. Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html.

  Show HN: Algora – Paid open-source contributions - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35412226 - April 2023 (70 comments)

• by paulgb on 10/4/23, 8:03 PM

  I used Algora for an issue for an open source project (y-sweet[1]) after bashing my head against the wall for 30 mins on it. It ended up being one of those “knowing where to hit the hammer” type problems and someone solved it in a matter of minutes with a 1 LOC PR. Money well spent.

  [1] https://github.com/drifting-in-space/y-sweet/

• by FlxMgdnz on 10/4/23, 7:04 PM

  As a COSS founder I love the visibility we get for the issues we put on Algora. We've awarded $855 to 7 external contributors so far and are more than happy with the results. The founder team is awesome - Ioannis and Zaf are great guys and a valuable asset to the open source community.

  I look forward to putting out many more bounties on Algora.

  Edit: here's the link to our Algora page https://console.algora.io/org/teamhanko

• by podoman on 10/4/23, 7:27 PM

  We use algora at https://highlight.io and love it:

  1. We get OSS contributors incentivized to work on the features that we want to prioritize.

  2. It acts as a great hiring funnel.

  Congrats on the launch.

• by hiAndrewQuinn on 10/4/23, 6:49 PM

  This is phenomenal. Even if your bounty gets scooped, you're working in public and therefore building valuable YoE with actual stakeholders.

  Is there a limit to how low you can go? The lowest bounty I saw was $15.

• by samejr on 10/4/23, 7:55 PM

  We’ve been using Algora at https://trigger.dev for a while now. Other than being great for bountying issues we’ve found it especially helpful for getting video walkthroughs of our onboarding created and improving our docs.

  Great product!

• by coderintherye on 10/4/23, 7:10 PM

  Great work.

  Quick suggestion: Separate bounties with a "claim" active from the search for "Open Bounties".

  I spent last 15 minutes reading through the bounty and thread only to get to the end and see a claim was already initiated 4 days ago.

• by McAdam on 10/4/23, 7:59 PM

  Love Algora!

  Amazing both as a repo owner, but also as someone who has urgent issues in other repos.

  The fact that you can add bounties to any issue on github is spectacular.

• by skeptrune on 10/4/23, 7:03 PM

  Review from a bootsrapped founding team:

  TLDR we really enjoy Algora!

  ### Things to be aware of

  - if you practice linear commit history then it is important to provide clear guidelines for that in your instructions on the issue

  - you should go into it with your own rules on how you will handle competing bounty solutions. Are you going to take the better one or the first?

  - frequently you will need to cleanup bounty PRs. I.e. change from inline styles to tailwind, use middleware instead of inline controls on functions, etc.

  - It is much easier to get bounty hunters when your project uses beginner friendly pieces like React/Astro. We have a lot of regret for going with SolidJS.

  ### Weaknesses

  - I wish there was a way to boost the bounty for contributors that I know had already gotten the project to run locally. Some multiplier for them would be really nice.

  - Similarly, I want to put a multiplier on a series of issues in a chain. So the first one is at 1x then second 1.5x, etc.

  - 9% fee is pretty brutal on the bounties

  - Cannot pay bounty hunters in crypto

  - There are a lot of Rust projects listed, but I still feel the hunters we worked with were not strong Rust programmers

  ### Strengths

  - the spend is getting work done and also marketing to some extent as the Algora bounty page will direct traffic to your Github and landing page

  - response times to bounties are incredibly fast

  - Bounty hunters are global so work can get done on your repo 24/7

• by zicon35 on 10/4/23, 6:43 PM

  Amazing team and product solving a real problem.

  Congrats on all the progress!

• by gcampos on 10/4/23, 8:14 PM

  It's an interesting system but the reward of the bounties, specially when thinking of $/hour, makes me wonder what is the quality of the work.

• by xeonmc on 10/4/23, 6:48 PM

  can you create bounties for projects that you have zero affiliations with?

• by monlockandkey on 10/4/23, 7:03 PM

  Is it possible to sort by programming language?

• by sibjafferi on 10/4/23, 7:03 PM

  how do I find a list of all unclaimed bounties?

• by CarlosVirreira on 10/4/23, 6:47 PM

  Shelf <3 Algora