Open Source & Sponsors

The driving force of Couchers is the global volunteer team, and they are the stars of the show.

That said, Couchers is an open-source project and we are very heavy users of open-source technologies ourselves. We want to give a huge shout out to the folks who have built the tools and technologies that make Couchers possible! We are also supported by some great companies that help us build and operate Couchers, whether it is because we are a non-profit or an open-source project.

Open Source Technologies

We'd like to thank the amazing folks who built these core technologies, without which Couchers couldn't exist:

• The PostgreSQL open-source database project: this incredible project provides the backbone to Couchers!
• The Python language: old & gold!
• The React Ecosystem that powers our web platform
• The Protocol Buffers and gRPC open-source projects
• The PostGIS geospatial extension to Postgres
• The MapLibre and Protomaps projects that have given everyone the power to have pretty maps!
• The SQLAlchemy, GeoAlchemy 2, and Psycopg projects
• The Material UI project, without which our website would look awful
• The Ubuntu and Mansalva open-source fonts
• The Weblate open-source project that allows us to easily translate the site
• The Prometheus/Victoriametrics/Grafana monitoring stack
• The Wiki.js project that powers our wiki
• The Chatwoot open source support platform project that powers all our Support systems

Company Sponsorships

We want to thank the following companies that provide us with freebies (either specifically because we're a non-profit/open-source, or in general to everyone):

• Amazon Web Services (AWS): Couchers runs fully in the cloud and our hosting bills are partially offset by the generous non-profit credit program by AWS!
• GitHub hosts all our code and is where we build Couchers (come help out by the way)
• GitLab sponsors us a very generous CI/CD allowance, allowing us to ship better software quicker!
• Google sponsors us free email & drive
• Sentry sponsors a Sentry for Good plan for us to track and tackle bugs
• Monday sponsors us a plan that helps us organize our recruiting processes
• Stripe gives us a discount on processing fees
• Maxmind gives us access to free GeoIP data
• Slack sponsors our Slack workspace with a free Pro Plan where we collaborate

Past Company Sponsorships

In the past, we received generous sponsorship from Vercel and utilized the free plan of Mapbox (who are also the original creators of some of the core open-source mapping technologies we rely on).