Paid issue bounties: let maintainers price issues and pay on merge

Paid issue bounties: let maintainers price issues and pay on merge targets a $10.8B = 27M professional developers x $400 avg annual spend on maintenance/bounties/tools total addressable market with low saturation and a year-over-year growth rate of 30% (developer-tools + open-source funding channels).

Key trends driving demand: Open-source sustainability -- companies and users demand reliable maintenance funding for key dependencies, increasing willingness to pay for targeted fixes.; Automation & CI integration -- modern CI/CD and repo webhook ecosystems make payout-on-merge reliable and auditable, enabling automated marketplaces.; AI-assisted triage & estimation -- ML models can estimate effort and suggest prices for issues, reducing friction for non-technical funders.; Rise of developer marketplaces -- specialized marketplaces (bounties, freelance) normalize paying per-ticket work rather than full-time hiring..