GGitHubfeat: add AI Engineering Learning Paths (#444)

Sponsorship

ai-engineering-from-scratch is a free, MIT-licensed curriculum. 523 lessons across 20 phases. The work is built and maintained by Rohit Ghumare.

Cash sponsorships fund the time it takes to ship lessons, keep the site running, and reply to the issue queue. Production hardware is considered separately under the Hardware Lab Partner policy. Service credits, equity, or "we'll write your content" arrangements are not accepted. See Hard rules.

If you or your company want to support the curriculum, this page is the rate card.

GitHub Sponsors: github.com/sponsors/rohitg00

GitHub Sponsors handles billing, receipts, and tax forms. 0% platform fee on personal sponsorships, up to 6% on organization sponsorships, per GitHub's policy.

For clarity: the curriculum has no token, no coin, no NFT, no wallet, and no chain partnership. The maintainer does not endorse, promote, partner with, or accept payment from any crypto project. The funding link above is the only channel; anything else using this project's name is unaffiliated.

Reach

These are real numbers, not pitch decks. Website figures come from the production Vercel Web Analytics dashboard. Website and GitHub figures were verified 2026-08-29.

Window	Visitors	Page views	Bounce rate
Last 30 days	114,584 (+4%)	181,995 (+3%)	71% (-1%)
2026-03-31 to 2026-08-29	477,679	765,584	72%

GitHub stars: 50,728
Top referrers, last 30 days: Google (17K), X / t.co (9.7K), GitHub (4.2K)
Top pages, last 30 days: / (84K), /index.html (34K), /prereqs.html (10K), /catalog.html (5.5K), /glossary.html (2.6K)

Gold, Platinum, and Diamond sponsors also receive the cross-platform co-features defined in the tier ladder below.

A sponsor placement at this scale is in the same range as a paid slot in a 100-250K monthly dev newsletter or a mid-tier independent dev blog.

Tier ladder

Tier	$/mo	Min term	What you get
Backer	$25	month-to-month	Name in BACKERS.md, Sponsors badge on your GitHub profile
Bronze	$250	3 months	Text-only row in the README sponsor block, name in BACKERS.md, one launch-day tweet thanking the tier
Silver	$750	6 months	Small logo (max 120×40) in the README sponsor row, listed as one supported provider in API lessons where applicable, quarterly thank-you in release notes
Gold	$2,000	6 months	Medium logo (max 200×60) in README + dedicated row on the sponsor page of the curriculum site + one X / LinkedIn co-feature per quarter
Platinum	$5,000	12 months, max 1 partner	Hero logo above the fold + named in every release-notes post for the term + one dedicated integration lesson under Phase 11 or Phase 14, written by the maintainer to the same editorial standard as the rest of the curriculum
Diamond / Title Partner	$10,000	12 months, max 1 partner	Sole title-partner placement in the README sponsor block and sponsor page + hero logo above the fold + named in every release-notes post + one maintainer-written integration lesson + quarterly audience report and X / LinkedIn co-feature

Pricing is calibrated against the public sponsor pages of comparable open-source projects, the analytics above, and standard dev-blog sponsor rates at the 100-250K monthly visitor scale (see Pricing anchors below).

Hardware Lab Partner

Hardware companies can sponsor the course by gifting production GPUs, AI workstations, storage, networking, or edge systems. The hardware becomes the maintainer's property on delivery.

Gifted hardware may be used, modified, benchmarked, repurposed, or retired as needed for lessons and repository work. The provider receives up to 12 months of Hardware Lab Partner recognition on the sponsor page and in relevant work. Hardware does not automatically grant a cash sponsorship tier.

Contact the maintainer before shipping hardware.

Hard rules

These rules are non-negotiable. Sponsors who cannot accept them are politely declined.

No lesson-body placements. Logos appear in the README sponsor block, on the curriculum site's sponsor page, and in BACKERS.md only. Never inside phases/**/docs/en.md, outputs/, code samples, or anywhere a learner is reading the curriculum content itself.
"Supported provider" does not mean "recommended." Every API lesson shows three or more providers behind the same interface. Sponsors get listed alongside the others; they are never marked as the default, the preferred choice, or the answer to "which should I use."
No sponsor-authored content. The maintainer writes every lesson. Sponsors review integration PRs for technical accuracy only; they do not propose narratives, frame trade-offs, or veto comparisons.
No roadmap veto. Platinum sponsors may submit roadmap suggestions like anyone else. The maintainer decides what ships.
30-day editorial-conflict exit. If a sponsor pressures the maintainer to bias content, the sponsorship terminates within 30 days with a pro-rata refund. The logo drops on the next site deploy.
Conflict refusal. The curriculum declines sponsors whose product directly contradicts curriculum principles (closed-loop vibe-coding tools, vendor lock-in evangelism, agent products that ignore observability or refuse to ship with open formats). Refusal is at the maintainer's sole discretion.
Cash or approved hardware only. Service credits, equity, "we'll do your DevRel for you," sponsor-authored content, and bundle deals are not accepted. Hardware must follow the written Hardware Lab Partner policy above.

Counter-proposals from prospective sponsors

If your company has a different ask, the right move is to read the tier ladder and the hard rules, then propose a specific tier and term in your first email. Do not open with "how about we trade you free credits for a hero placement" or "we'd like to write the integration ourselves" — those are pre-declined under the hard rules above and the email will end with a link back to this page.

Pricing anchors

The tier amounts above are anchored against (a) public sponsor pages of comparable open-source projects, and (b) standard sponsor-slot rates for 100-250K monthly visitor dev publications. Audience figures and GitHub stars verified 2026-08-29.

Comparable open-source rate cards:

Open-source baseline — Drupal AI Developer Assistant, Babel, Parcel, Vue.js all open Bronze at $100/mo with text-only recognition. Bronze here sits at $250 because the curriculum carries the audience traffic none of those repos individually carry.
$750 Silver sits above Babel Silver ($500) and Drupal AI Gold ($500); below Vue Platinum ($2,000). Defensible at the curriculum's monthly traffic.
$2,000 Gold matches Babel Base Support (billed yearly at $24K = $2K/mo) and Vue Platinum.
$5,000 Platinum matches Vue Diamond. At 50.7K stars + 114.6K monthly visitors, the dedicated lesson + hero placement is what justifies the price.
$10,000 Diamond / Title Partner is one exclusive annual slot. The rate reflects 50.7K stars, 477.7K visitors and 765.6K page views from 2026-03-31 to 2026-08-29, title placement, quarterly reporting, and the maintainer-written integration work.

What sponsorship pays for

Listed in order of how the next dollar gets spent:

Maintainer time on new lessons and on the issue queue.
Site hosting, domain, and CDN (Vercel + custom domains).
Diagram authoring tools, font licensing, design assets.
One-time research or content fees for guest lesson reviewers when a phase covers territory outside the maintainer's depth.
Contributor bounties on specific issues that have been open longer than 30 days.

Pick a tier above.
Subscribe via GitHub Sponsors.
For Silver and above, email the maintainer with: your logo (SVG preferred), the URL you want it linked to, and the term length you've committed to.
The logo lands in the next site deploy, usually within 48 hours.
Receipts and invoices are issued by GitHub Sponsors automatically.

Hardware partners follow the separate Hardware Lab Partner process and must agree to written terms before shipping equipment.

Cancellation is one click in your GitHub Sponsors dashboard. The logo drops on the next site deploy after the current billing period ends. No clawback, no exit interview, no hard feelings. Sponsorships fund the curriculum; they do not buy a relationship.