cashcn

Ultra-simple payments to OSS maintainers via the CLI — a smarter npm fund.

cashcn resolves a maintainer / repo / package to its funding destinations and opens the right hosted checkout, pre-filled with your amount and recurrence.

npx cashcn <verb> <destination> <amount>[/{m,y}]

It is a discovery + deep-link tool. Money never touches cashcn — it routes you to GitHub Sponsors / Open Collective / Liberapay / etc. with the amount and recurrence already filled in. That is the one shape of this idea that is shippable today with zero PCI/KYC burden (see cashcn.md research for why actually moving the money requires becoming a regulated payment platform).

Why a POC, and what it proves

The research found that reading funding data is easy everywhere but initiating a payment via API is gated on every fiat platform (GitHub createSponsorship is recurring-only and charges the caller's card; Open Collective blocks external Stripe/PayPal charges; thanks.dev / Liberapay have no payment API). What is fully feasible is deep-linking into the hosted checkout with the recipient, amount and recurrence prefilled. This POC demonstrates that end-to-end.

Usage

# verbs are all synonyms (read it like a sentence):
#   pay donate sponsor gift send tip back fund thank support

npx cashcn pay     gh://franky47     100      # one-time $100
npx cashcn sponsor 47ng/nuqs         10/m     # $10 / month
npx cashcn donate  oc://antfu        25/y     # $25 / year
npx cashcn tip     npm://nuqs        5/m      # resolve npm pkg funding

The $ prefix is intentionally dropped — it triggers shell variable expansion. Amounts are plain numbers with an optional /m or /y suffix.

Add --print (or --dry-run) to resolve and build the link without opening a browser — handy for scripting and for seeing what got resolved.

Destinations

| Form | Meaning | |---|---| | gh://<user> | GitHub user → GitHub Sponsors (+ their profile FUNDING.yml) | | gh://<owner>/<repo> | GitHub repo → reads .github/FUNDING.yml | | npm://<pkg> | npm package → reads its funding field, then the repo's FUNDING.yml | | oc://<slug> | Open Collective collective | | <user> | shorthand for gh://<user> | | <owner>/<repo> | shorthand for gh://<owner>/<repo> |

Scoped npm packages need the explicit scheme: npm://@scope/pkg.

How it works

1. Parse the destination (src/destination.js) and amount (src/amount.js).
2. Resolve funding targets (src/resolve.js) by unioning:
   • the npm registry funding field,
   • .github/FUNDING.yml (src/funding-yml.js, a minimal parser),
   • GitHub Sponsors directly for a bare user.
3. Rank targets by how well each can be pre-filled (src/platforms.js): Open Collective > Liberapay > GitHub Sponsors > profile-only. Liberapay is recurring-only, so it's demoted for one-time payments.
4. Build the deep-link with amount / interval / frequency injected where the platform supports it, and open it (src/open-url.js).

GitHub Sponsors tier resolution

GitHub has no free-form amount query param — you can only deep-link to a specific tier, identified by a numeric tier_id. cashcn resolves the tier whose price exactly matches your amount (src/github-tiers.js), trying in order:

1. gh CLI — gh api graphql lists every tier with its node id (decoded to the numeric tier_id). Authoritative; used when gh is installed + authed. An exact match deep-links to that tier (so the sponsor lands on its rewards).
2. Public-page crawl — scrapes github.com/sponsors/<login> for the tier_id ↔ price pairs. Token-free fallback when gh isn't available.
3. Custom amount — if no exact tier matches, pre-fill a free-form amount on the /sponsorships checkout (?frequency=…&amount=…). GitHub honours this as long as the maintainer has custom amounts enabled.

One-time and monthly tiers have different ids, so pay … 10 and sponsor … 10/m resolve to different tiers. GitHub has no yearly tier, so /y skips the lookup.

Pre-fill capability (per research)

| Platform | Amount | Recurrence | Notes | |---|---|---|---| | Open Collective | ✅ | ✅ | ?amount=&interval=month\|year | | Liberapay | ✅ | ✅ | recurring-only; currency required or amount is dropped | | GitHub Sponsors | ✅ | ✅ | exact-amount tier → tier_id, else custom amount (see below) | | Patreon / Ko-fi / Buy Me a Coffee / Polar | ❌ | ❌ | opens the profile page only |

Limitations (it's a POC)

• FUNDING.yml parser handles the flat key: value / key: [a, b] shape only — not arbitrary YAML. Swap in a real parser for production.
• No ecosyste.ms aggregator backstop, no funding.json (floss.fund) source yet — both are noted in the research as worthwhile additions.
• GitHub tier resolution matches the amount exactly; it doesn't snap to the nearest tier (that would silently change what you pay). Tier lookups aren't cached, so each GitHub deep-link makes one gh/HTTP call.
• Zero runtime dependencies on purpose, so npx-from-source has no install step. (The tier lookup shells out to gh only if it's already on your PATH.)

Run from source

node bin/cashcn.js sponsor 47ng/nuqs 10/m --print