Giving Back, 2023 edition

Author
Prateek Rungta
Published

It was probably sometime in the late 2000s that I first came across the idea of an organisation pledging to donate a percentage of their profits to charity. I cannot recall exactly where I first read about this practise but it was probably on one of the early web 2.0 gang members’ projects. The idea seemed so novel at the time, yet also felt right, and I made a mental note to do the same if I ever when I ran my own shop.

Fast forward a few years, I was co-running my own shop, booking some profits, making an odd donation or two, but not really following the principle that had inspired me back then.

That finally changed in 2020. A lot of things got upended in that First Year of Covid™, but new practises also emerged as a result. We deliberated, sought opinions from the team, and put in place a process to make annual donations to three types of causes. Our pool is split three ways between:

  1. Issues that impact our work.
  2. Issues that impact our industry.
  3. Issues that impact our society.

This is the fourth time we’re following through and giving back a percentage of our profits. This year we donated to:

  • Prettier, for keeping our code consistent and saving countless trivial formatting and style-guide reviews.
  • Electronic Frontier Foundation, for continuing to fight for digital rights.
  • Wikipedia, for documenting so much of the universe, and showing the best of the power of the web.

Just like the first three times1, we are talking about this publicly in the hope that it encourages others, like it once encouraged us. Please join our efforts by amplifying the contributions to these organisations and projects.


  1. Past recipients include:

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