A play on stake: a public record of work. Not money, shares, a token or a debt.

Get the value you'd pay for, free, today.

Steak is a way to run an open-source project so that if it ever makes money (donations, sponsorships, grants), all of it goes back to the people who build it, after running costs, by the value of what they contributed. The founder starts with zero Steak and earns it like everyone else.

Use it Read the model

How it works

A public record beside the code. Each project keeps a stake repository next to its code. Every change, review and payout lands there in plain files anyone can read.
People size the work. When a pull request opens, Steak suggests a size from the diff. A maintainer other than the author decides, with a label: steak:1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13 or 21.
Merges are recorded for you. When the pull request merges, a workflow writes the change and its reviews to the stake repository. A review earns a quarter of the change's size, for up to two reviewers.
Money, if it comes, goes out each quarter. First a reserve, then the projects it builds on, then everything else to contributors by their Steak. It is paid through a fiscal host such as Open Collective, never through a personal account.
Anyone can check it. Each stake repository carries its own copy of the tool, and steak verify recomputes every payout from the record.

All of it runs in GitHub Actions as plain code. There are no AI calls, unless you choose a small local model to suggest sizes.

The deal

Users	Get the product free, today
Money in	Donations, sponsorships and grants, received by the project's fiscal host
Money out	Each quarter with revenue: a reserve, then upstream projects, then everything else to contributors
Contributors	Paid by the value of merged work, sized in Steak by a maintainer
Founder	Starts at zero Steak, earns it under one disclosed account, sized by someone else
Nobody	Owns the project, votes over its money, or holds a claim that can be sold

The formula, and why it has this shape, are in MODEL.md. The files and formats are in SPEC.md.

Use it

Steak runs on Bun. From a checkout of Steak, set up a project's stake repository, and with --code the code repository's workflows:

git clone https://github.com/irie-people/steak
cd steak
bun src/steak.ts init ../myproject-stake --name myproject --org myproject-org \
  --founder <handle> --code ../myproject

init never overwrites a file. Then, once per project, give the code repository a STAKE_TOKEN secret (a fine-grained token that can write the stake repository's contents and pull requests), and run its steak workflow by hand once to make the steak:N labels. The README lists every setting.

Who runs on Steak

Irie, Riddim and Steak itself. Their records are public: Irie's, Riddim's and Steak's.