Prefect's open source sponsorship: 2026 update
Open source is part of everything we build at Prefect. The libraries behind our products are the work of people who spend their time fixing bugs, reviewing contributions, and keeping software useful for everyone. We're grateful for that work and glad to support the people doing it.
This year, we contributed $40,000 to 12 open source maintainers, project teams, and collectives. That's up from $30,000 in our 2025 update, and it reflects a wider view of the ecosystem we depend on across Prefect, Dagster, and FastMCP.
We averaged 20 full-time engineers in 2026. Our contribution works out to $2,000 per engineer, which meets the Open Source Pledge minimum of $2,000 per developer per year.
Supporting the people behind the stack
Our dependencies handle database migrations, run our test suites, watch for file changes, and connect Python to Rust. When they work well, we can focus on building our own products.
For 2026, we looked across Prefect, Dagster, and FastMCP to see where that work overlaps. One maintainer or small team often keeps several of our dependencies running. So we grouped related projects and sponsored the people behind them rather than treating each package as a separate relationship.
With Dagster now part of Prefect, we expanded our sponsorships to include more of the libraries its community relies on, such as structlog, GraphQL-core, and watchdog, while shared foundations such as SQLAlchemy, pytest, and PyO3 remain on the list.
The maintainers and projects we supported
Our sponsorships went to:
- Marcelo Trylesinski (Starlette and Uvicorn): The ASGI framework and server behind the Prefect server API, the Dagster webserver, and FastMCP's HTTP transport.
- SQLAlchemy and Alembic: Database access and migrations for Prefect and Dagster.
- Pallets (Jinja and Click): Templating and command-line tools for Prefect and Dagster.
- pytest collective: pytest and the plugins around it, which run the test suites for Prefect, Dagster, and FastMCP.
- Bernát Gábor (filelock, platformdirs, tox, and virtualenv): File locking in Dagster, config paths in FastMCP, and the tox and virtualenv tools behind Python test environments.
- Hynek Schlawack (structlog): Structured logging in Dagster.
- Christoph Zwerschke (GraphQL-core): A foundation of Dagster's GraphQL API and webserver.
- Mickaël Schoentgen (watchdog): File watching for Dagster's logs and events.
- Julian Berman (jsonschema): Schema validation in Prefect and in Dagster's
dgCLI. - Brian Pugh (Cyclopts): A framework for building the command-line interfaces in Prefect and FastMCP.
- websockets: WebSocket communication across all three products.
- David Hewitt (PyO3): Rust–Python bindings used in pydantic-core, a shared foundation across our products.
A shared responsibility
These projects serve far more than our own software. Supporting their maintainers is a way to give back to the broader Python and data communities.
We'd love to see more companies take a closer look at their dependencies and support the people behind them. The Open Source Pledge is one place to start. Pick a project your team uses, learn who maintains it, and find a way to contribute.
To the maintainers and contributors behind these tools: thank you. Your work makes ours possible, and we're happy to give something back.