[HN Gopher] Pocketbase lost its funding from FLOSS fund
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Pocketbase lost its funding from FLOSS fund
Author : Onavo
Score : 103 points
Date : 2026-02-18 16:11 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| That's a shame, would love to know if "FLOSS fun" is legit or
| not. Seems like a mess.
| murillians wrote:
| I think this submission should be re-titled. From the post, it
| seems that the author voluntarily declined funding from
| FLOSS/Fund because they "don't trust them, nor the India
| government, with processing and storing personal sensitive data"
| BoredPositron wrote:
| It's a wire transfer not your medical records. Use escrow if
| you are paranoid.
| DiabloD3 wrote:
| I think it shouldn't.
|
| The funding source was dropped by Github, and the terms
| Pocketbase accepted for funding include being paid through
| Github by FLOSS Fund. FLOSS Fund refused to follow the
| regulatory requirements to continue funding projects through
| Github, and Github dropped them as a funding source.
|
| What the Pocketbase maintainer decided was to drop FLOSS Fund
| after they tried to renegotiate the contract in dangerous and
| unethical ways. FLOSS Fund _chose_ to not follow regulatory
| requirements that Github required.
| bawolff wrote:
| Its a contract where they give money in exchange for
| basically nothing.
|
| It may be reasonable for pocketbase to refuse, but i have
| trouble seeing floss fund being unethical or in the wrong
| when we're talking about giving away money for nothing.
| Especially when the ask is just fill out the paperwork for a
| wire transfer, the world standard for sending money
| internationally.
| Onavo wrote:
| Don't think escrow is possible because of KYC requirements,
| then again the regulations in India might be different.
| sreekanth850 wrote:
| Are you saying sending money via Wire transfer is unethical?
| Its a standard way to send money in cross boarder
| transactions. Please do note that India is highly regulated
| for financial transaction that go outside the country so,
| please don't spread something like they are doing it
| illegally. Zerodha is a well known firm they are open about
| this funding. 1 Million every year just because they used
| many oss project. That is not un ethical.
| DiabloD3 wrote:
| From what I can tell, no, they weren't just asking for wire
| details. They were were asking for multiple forms of
| identification.
|
| If I was in his place, I don't think I'd send everything
| required to steal my identity to some company in a foreign
| country that I have no legal recourse in.
| rvnx wrote:
| The irony is that a lot of the KYC checks are actually
| done in India: Jumio, Onfido, LexisNexis, Refinitiv,
| HyperVerge, IDfy, Signzy (a lot of major banks)
|
| So his ID is probably there already
| justinclift wrote:
| Sure, but this would have changed that from "probably" to
| "definitely". :(
| rvnx wrote:
| Unethical ? "they want to issue a wire transfer, but I don't
| feel comfortable giving my IBAN"
|
| If the IBAM is the concern you can create a separate IBAN
| with Wise / Revolut for example quite easily (and for free,
| and for sure cheaper than refusing the money).
| fdefitte wrote:
| Calling standard KYC paperwork for international wire
| transfers "dangerous and unethical" is a huge stretch. Every
| cross-border payment requires this stuff. The fund is
| literally trying to give away free money and the maintainer
| threw a fit because they had to fill out a tax form. I get
| being cautious about sharing personal info but framing
| compliance requirements as some kind of attack is drama for
| drama's sake.
| reenorap wrote:
| This is false. I just did an international wire transfer a
| few weeks ago with no KYC.
| protimewaster wrote:
| > FLOSS Fund refused to follow the regulatory requirements to
| continue funding projects through Github, and Github dropped
| them as a funding source.
|
| The email they sent to Pocketbase (posted elsewhere in the
| thread) makes it sound like the regulatory issue with GitHub
| funding is still being worked on. The email also doesn't
| sound like it ruled out the option to wait until the GitHub
| situation potentially gets sorted out in the future and
| simply recommended that they use a wire transfer to get
| things moving.
| fossmaintainer wrote:
| Here's the actual e-mail the fund sent:
|
| Hey ******, I hope you're doing well. I apologise for the long
| delay on this disbursal from our end, and for not reaching out
| to you sooner.
|
| I am writing to you with an update on GitHub Sponsors, your
| preferred mode of payment. Unfortunately, we're currently
| unable to process payments through GitHub Sponsors, Liberapay,
| OpenCollective, or similar platforms due to regulatory
| constraints. We still have no clarity on when this will become
| possible. We shared some context on this earlier here:
| https://floss.fund/blog/second-tranche-2025-anniversary/
|
| We recommend that we move ahead with a wire transfer (although
| it involves some paperwork!). This involves:
|
| 1) Tax Residency Certificate (TRC) from your country of
| residence/incorporation for the current year.
|
| 2) Signed copy of the "No Permanent Establishment in India
| Declaration" (Template attached)
|
| 3) Form 10F to avoid double taxation for non-Indian entities
| and individuals. This is an online form that has to be filled
| out on the Indian Tax Department website. Instructions on how
| to fill it out are attached to this email. Please refer to this
| FAQ for more details.
|
| 4) Service Agreement - Please fill in the sections marked in
| yellow and send it back to us (Attached)
|
| 5) Invoice for the grant amount (sample attached with required
| fields highlighted, feel free to use your own invoice template
| if needed. Please mention "project development support" in the
| invoice description).
|
| Once you have these, please send them over so that we can begin
| processing the payment.
|
| Please note that these documents are required in our
| jurisdiction (India) for processing foreign payments. A
| percentage of the payment will be withheld as per the DTAA
| (Double-Taxation Avoidance Agreement) between India and your
| country, which the recipient can claim back while filing tax
| returns in their country. The specific withholding rate depends
| on the DTAA regulations between your country and India.
|
| If you have any questions, please feel free to write to us.
|
| Thank you once again for your patience
| yorwba wrote:
| Where did you get that email from?
| 8cvor6j844qw_d6 wrote:
| Looking at the required paperwork, I agree with Pocketbase to
| refuse funding.
| mbreese wrote:
| If you were already setup as a non-profit entity with 501c3
| US taxes (or similar in other locales), this would be
| straightforward. Or, even if you were a for-profit company
| taking part with an LLC or other corporate structure. In
| those cases, you probably already have an accountant or tax
| advisor to help handle this stuff. For smaller individual
| level contributors, I can see how the extra paperwork and
| overhead could create enough of a hassle to make it not
| worthwhile. Which is sad.
|
| It looks like the author here is from Bulgaria, so who
| knows what other hassles they would have on their side.
| choilive wrote:
| Why? I don't see it as particularly onerous. They are
| simply complying with their country's KYC requirements.
| I've gone through worse to accept payments from US citizens
| with a US corporation. KYC/AML is annoying but its pretty
| unavoidable unless you want to do crypto.
| ExpertAdvisor01 wrote:
| It's not really kyc . It's just standard procedure to
| claim Double tax treaty benefits.
|
| You can look at the us W8-BEN
| iririririr wrote:
| invoice for fund disbursement? are they trying to donate as
| expenses?
| swiftcoder wrote:
| Most US companies take a tax deduction for charitable
| donations, I don't see why that wouldn't be the same for an
| Indian firm.
| ExpertAdvisor01 wrote:
| No it's just that the Indian company is required to
| withhold taxes . But they want to use the double taxation
| treaty to claim benefits to reduce it
| nwellnhof wrote:
| Paying individual OSS contributors without a service
| agreement is not a charitable donation with regard to
| taxes. It's not a deductible business expense and
| typically leads to double taxation.
| ExpertAdvisor01 wrote:
| These are perfectly normal requests .
|
| These are needed to reduce withholding taxes and claim treaty
| benefits .
| graemep wrote:
| That seems reasonable. It mostly looks necessary to comply
| with tax and banking laws.
| abtinf wrote:
| There are so many projects I could use pocketbase for, if only it
| supported Postgres.
|
| I get the philosophical reasons behind why it doesn't and why
| it's SQLite only.
|
| It's just that in a corporate environment, I could trivially
| deliver full production ready applications because there is a
| team that handles all the Postgres
| replication/failover/ha/dr/backups/recovery for me. Pocketbase
| with pg would be super simple to deploy to a pod, getting 95% of
| production readiness done.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| > There are so many projects I could use pocketbase for, if
| only it supported Postgres.
|
| So... you want Supabase? which is what Pocketbase is inspired
| by.
| Onavo wrote:
| It's not single binary, you need to spin up a dozen or so
| containers and have a full DevOps team on standby if self
| hosting.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| Well yeah, that's the nature of using something like
| Supabase it is designed to scale and be flexible to develop
| on top of.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Yes, OP _wants_ to hand the database to their team.
| Onavo wrote:
| No. OP said they want to handle the _database_ to their
| team. They didn 't say anything about the auth,
| analytics, admin dashboards, real time change data
| management proxies, connection poolers to their team.
| Your modern backend as a service that's not pocketbase
| usually has a dozen moving parts.
|
| Most enterprise teams have plug and play SQL databases
| ready to go, anything else would require more work with
| DevOps.
| mtct88 wrote:
| Supabase? https://supabase.com/
| born-jre wrote:
| I am also building similar product but with different approach
| And just using SQLite for now but plan on adding Postgres
| support ( orm I am using supports it ) ... but nowhere near
| production ready. Due to buzz around products like litestream I
| feel like just SQLite is also viable nowadays. I also have own
| cdc based replication thing wip but yeah just having fun stage
|
| https://github.com/blue-monads/potatoverse
| slopinthebag wrote:
| like others have said, try sup abase
|
| https://supabase.com/docs/guides/self-hosting/docker
|
| i havent tried self hosting but it doesn't look too tricky
| mc007 wrote:
| setup is easy but you're stuck with one instance. they
| stripped all multi-tenant features and even the selfhosted
| version is missing essential features, scaling is off the
| table though.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| Back in 2024, FLOSS/fund was described like this on HN:
|
| > To apply, the project must place a funding.json in their public
| code repository or at a well-known uri location on their domain
| [...] That's already 10x more simpler than the 20 page document
| some of these other orgs have you fill. -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41857032
|
| But the author of the issue for Pocketbase writes:
|
| > due to some unforeseen regulatory constraints their partnership
| with GitHub didn't seem to work out. Instead they want to issue a
| wire transfer from India requiring several cross-jurisdictional
| paperwork but I don't feel comfortable doing that
|
| It's a shame that it didn't seem like they could work out how to
| keep it as simple, I wonder if basing it in a different country
| could have made a difference.
| sreekanth850 wrote:
| India have a strict process for sending and receiving money
| from outside as investment. Its mainly to avoid black money i
| guess.
| a456463 wrote:
| Indians are to blame for this. The indian goverment is
| dictatorial and has no expectations or respect of privacy or
| human rights
| sentientslug wrote:
| I don't think it's fair to conflate the people of India
| with their government
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| As a population they're responsible for picking their
| government.
| AmbroseBierce wrote:
| In the same way an adult is responsable for "picking" the
| religion they believe in, the one that it was imposed
| upon them by their parents during their childhood.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| We know democratic systems are barely working in little
| countries of 350 million people like the USA. Are we
| really surprised they are imperfect when scaled up to 1.5
| billion people?
| Nexxxeh wrote:
| Given the impact of international terrorism and crime on
| India, minimising illicit money flow in and out of the
| country seems an inherently sensible precaution.
| nickff wrote:
| Many countries have similar controls; they're often
| represented as being anti-money-laundering, and anti-
| terrorism, but they are also used to control capital
| outflows, and improve tax compliance. I have never seen any
| evidence that this sort of control actually works to prevent
| money laundering or terrorist financing, but it does seem to
| help governments reduce monetary outflows and audit for tax
| compliance (when they bother to actually read what they
| receive).
| samalander wrote:
| Pocketbase is such a smooth and easy-to-use database - great for
| people starting with web dev. I'm disappointed that it's not
| going to get the continued funding that it deserves.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| > it's not going to get the continued funding that it deserves
|
| I don't think they ever saw that funding in the first place, if
| I'm reading "not waiting for the disbursal before making big
| announcements" correctly. I guess you need to be disappointed
| about them never receiving it in the first place, although it
| doesn't seem like the project owner would necessarily agree
| with you.
| bogzz wrote:
| Such a shame. I so love Pocketbase, used it when I was trying out
| HTMX for a side project.
|
| I get the sense that ganigeorgiev is feeling the thanklessness of
| open source work, and I so wish that he had an easier time of it.
|
| That said, it's a shame that a FLOSS fund being based in India is
| reason enough for it to be avoided. Like, I understand that
| Indians might be overrepresented in the scam space right now, but
| avoiding funding because of it involving "sharing data with the
| Indian government" is very silly in my opinion. And insulting to
| India.
| a456463 wrote:
| The Indian Govt is dictatorial and segregational. It is a valid
| concern. Freedom of speech and privacy are not something the
| government cares about upholding.
| 4ndrewl wrote:
| Can you spell ICE, Flock and Ring?
| notatoad wrote:
| Regardless of how authoritarian the government is in the
| project maintainer's home country, exposing themselves to a
| second authoritarian jurisdiction is probably a bad idea.
| k33n wrote:
| ICE doesn't have a contract with Flock and Ring cancelled
| its partnership with Flock also.
| leosanchez wrote:
| The Indian Govt is neither dictatorial not segregational.
| Maybe authoritarian which every Indian govt. after
| Independence.
| agentifysh wrote:
| not sure what the controversy here is receiving funding isn't the
| funder owning or hosting pocketbase ?
| snthd wrote:
| Could floss.fund reach an agreement with foreign orgs with
| similar goals, and let them to the disbursement to individuals?
|
| eg https://www.spi-inc.org/ https://nlnet.nl/
| anpat wrote:
| The conversation in comments seem to devolving in weird ways.
|
| The OP (and others) have right to opinions but I see bunch of
| projects having successfully received their grants
| https://floss.fund/projects/2025. OpenSSL and Krita being the
| prominent ones that I recognize.
|
| Calling the fund dangerous and unethical when they personally
| have zero control over regulations seems over the top to me.
| xannabxlle wrote:
| Is India really that backwards of a country that the author
| doesn't want to accept money from there?
| yieldcrv wrote:
| USDC has been an option for nearly 10 years
|
| You can circumvent international wire transfers for cheaper and
| faster
|
| The same banks give less scrutiny to domestic transfers so just
| convert your international wires into domestic ones - from the
| domestic exchange to your domestic bank account
|
| We've done that specifically with our Indian vendors and vice
| versa for 10 years
|
| there are options that are stable and regulated, so there is
| absolutely no reason to appeal to the authority of an antiquated
| and onerous regulation
| ExpertAdvisor01 wrote:
| These are very reasonable requirements .
|
| These are just the requirements to claim treaty benefits . A
| little bit of research wouldn't hurt.
|
| You have to fill out the Form-10f to claim treaty benefits for
| the reduction of withholding tax on services and royalties .
|
| These are the requirements:
|
| Tax Residency Certificate (TRC) (= extract from cantonal
| commercial register) * Non-Permanent Establishment Declaration
| (No PE Declaration) * Form 10F: If you are registered
| accordingly, Form 10F can be submitted online.
|
| Source: https://www.s-ge.com/en/article/export-
| knowhow/2023-e-india-...
|
| This is very unprofessional in my opinion how pocket base handled
| that issue as this is a perfectly reasonable request .
|
| It's a similar to the W8-BEN non us resident aliens have to file
| .
| solarisos wrote:
| It's always a tough moment for the community when a project as
| polished as Pocketbase hits a funding wall. It highlights the
| 'single point of failure' risk in one-person maintainer projects,
| even when the tech is solid. I hope they find a sustainable path
| forward that doesn't require compromising on their 'no-build' or
| 'single file' philosophy.
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