Merit Systems started with the observation that software is at its best when it's multiplayer.

But friction still exists. It's hard for projects to understand the impact of their contributors, challenging to find payment models that work for the industry, and if you do want to monetize, the administrative burdens are numerous: taxes, payroll, and incorporation. We believe that if we eliminate these challenges, we'll see even more innovation unlocked. So we founded Merit Systems to do that.

Today we're releasing the Terminal, a new interface for anyone building software in the open to easily surface and pay high-impact contributors. The Terminal makes understanding and supporting your ecosystem simple. It's now available to all GitHub users here, and any open-source builder can sign up for our payments beta here.

Projects now have a simple way to pay open source developers directly based on their contributions to a repo. Merit uses stablecoins for instant global payouts. We've designed our payment system to eliminate administrative overhead—Merit manages all taxes for you end-to-end—making it flexible for all kinds of open-source projects: from enduring infrastructure to teams that haven't incorporated yet.

Merit allows you to identify exactly what kinds of contributors you want to pay: maybe you want to focus only on longtime contributors who have been involved in making PRs to your repo for months or years. Or maybe you want to bring new contributors to your project, and decide to use Merit to pay a longer tail of developers who have recently merged PRs. Merit helps you understand contributor impact with PR insights, which display major initiatives over a given period. Whatever payment splits you want to devise, Merit makes it possible.

How To Use Merit

Merit enables you to pay existing contributors to a repo and attract new ones. Here are a few examples:

1. Open-core projects with an existing monetization model: Install Merit on your repo and grow your ecosystem with payout schedules you devise.
2. Non-profit repos that accept funding through partnerships or sponsorships: Install Merit on your repo and pay contributors to complete high-priority PRs while onboarding them to your community.
3. Rising open-source projects: Launched an AI tool gaining traction on X, Hacker News, and GitHub? Install Merit on your repo and attract new contributors to build your project with you.

In short, if you run or contribute to an open-source project that monetizes or accepts funding in any way, you can use Merit to pay existing contributors and onboard new ones. Think of Merit as a bank account for any GitHub user or repository. We enable multiplayer software with drop-in payments, so you can consistently attract developers to your repo. Reach out to try our beta today here.

We're also working on new ways for open-source projects to monetize directly, using technology we're building in-house. Stay tuned for our next release, coming in the next few weeks. Follow us on X for updates @merit_systems.

Today, anyone can log into the Terminal and use our interface to explore repositories. We're working with a limited number of launch partners interested in using the Terminal's payment functionality. If you'd like to be a part of this initial cohort, please reach out here. You can read more in our docs.

We're excited to launch the Terminal for the open source ecosystem and can't wait to hear from you.

If Merit's mission excites you, reach out! We're actively hiring developers to build the financial stack for open-source software with us. Learn more about our open roles here.