career-ops is permanently free, MIT-licensed, and community-funded.

career-ops is free software, MIT-licensed forever. Every mode, every portal scraper, the five-dimension rubric, the Block A–H evaluation prompt — they cost nothing to install, and they never will. But sustained maintenance is work: reading hundreds of community issues and writing thoughtful responses, investigating the edge case in /scan that surfaces in 1 of 200 listings, refusing the next “auto-apply” pull request with an explanation rather than silence. If career-ops saved you hours of spreadsheet work, surfaced a job interview, or just clarified what AI-augmented work looks like — and you have spare income — sponsoring the project is how you keep that work moving. Same five-star rubric. Same anti-spray-and-pray philosophy. Same MIT license.

How to sustain

Contribute to the project’s collective on Open Collective, once or on a recurring basis. Open Source Collective is its fiscal host: the money belongs to the project, and every contribution and expense is on a public ledger. If you’d rather not be named, Open Collective lets you contribute incognito: the amount stays public, your name doesn’t. No contribution from a person gates a perk. That is deliberate. A contribution that buys something is a contribution that can be leaned on.

Contribute on Open Collective →

What sponsorship doesn’t get you

• No private support. Technical questions get answered in the open community, where the next person searching the same problem can find the answer.
• No early access. Release windows are the same for everyone.
• No priority support. The triage queue is the triage queue.
• No premium docs. Everything is at career-ops.org/docs, MIT-licensed, free.
• No roadmap influence. Direction is set by the maintainer in conversation with the community. Money cannot buy a feature.
• No data ownership. Your data never leaves your machine, sponsor or not.

Corporate sponsorship

A contribution from a person buys no placement and no access, at any amount. Companies have their own tiers, with public prices, on Open Collective; placement starts after a quick fit check, and founding sponsorships are agreed in writing and invoiced by the fiscal host. Visibility only: it buys no influence over the roadmap and no personal services from any maintainer.

If you represent a mission-aligned organization, an open-source program office, a developer-tooling company, or a hiring-side product that respects the data contract, write to sponsors@career-ops.org.

Sponsors

career-ops is permanently free for candidates. Candidates never pay the project, and are never the product. Companies that sponsor it do so through the project’s fiscal host, Open Source Collective. Sponsors appear in the Sponsors row of the README and on this page; Supporters, on this page. The README is where the project is seen; this page is where it’s explained.

Sponsors

SerpApi

Build a portfolio project with live search data. SerpApi gives developers structured JSON/Markdown from Google Search, Maps, Shopping, and other engines through a simple API call.

Sponsorship buys clearly labeled visibility, never influence: no amount of money changes the roadmap or places anything in the product. Sponsors never appear in evaluations, rankings or recommendations.

Logos appear here only when real sponsors back the project. We don’t render placeholders to look bigger than we are.

In-kind support

Tooling provided to the maintainer through open source programs, for use on the project. It comes with no say over direction, like everything else on this page.

• OpenAI, Codex for Open Source: six months of ChatGPT Pro, from August 2026.