5M installs, $1M Open Source Grant program, and the story of how we got here

In July 2024, I spent a week in my mom's garage in Terre Haute building a demo for an Anthropic hackathon. The idea was simple: give an AI model the same tools I use as a developer. File access. Terminal commands. The ability to navigate a codebase the way a human would.

The demo didn't win. But that wasn't the point. The point was that this technology needed to be in developers' hands.

Today, we surpassed five million installations of Cline across VS Code, JetBrains, Cursor, Windsurf, and other editors through OpenVSX. That's not a number we manufactured through growth hacking. It happened because developers told other developers about something that actually worked.

To celebrate, we're committing $1 million dollars in Cline credits to fund open source projects.

From garage project to a world-class team and global community

I'm serious when I say the numbers surprised me. We went from a weekend project to 57,000 GitHub stars. Our contributor base grew 4,704% year over year. That growth happened because people who used Cline wanted to make it better.

Memory Bank is a good example of how this works. It's a way for Cline to maintain project context across sessions. The community built it, validated it, and turned it into one of our most-used features. That's the pattern: the community identifies what they need, contributes the solution, and helps shape it into something that works for everyone.

Some of those contributors are now on the team. What started as one person in a garage is now a team of over 35 and many of those people started as open source contributors. They submitted PRs, fixed bugs, added features, and helped shape what Cline became. As the project grew, it created the economic foundation to bring them on full-time. They went from contributing in their spare time to dedicating their entire focus to making Cline the best AI coding tool in the world.

This is the dream of open source. You contribute to something you believe in, and if it works, you get to pursue it full time. The project's success didn't just benefit users; it created real opportunity for the people who built it.

The ecosystem grew in ways we didn't anticipate

That same pattern, developers solving their own problems through open source, extended beyond our core team.

Recently, Amazon contributed Jupyter notebook compatibility to Cline. Engineers at one of the largest tech companies in the world opened PRs because they wanted this capability in their own workflows. No partnership announcement, no press release. Just developers contributing to open source because it solved a problem they had.

We were one of the first agents on the Vercel AI Gateway. We gave feedback, pushed edge cases, and helped shape how the gateway handles agentic workloads. Today, traffic from Cline users is #1 on that gateway.

Leading AI research labs now use Cline to test their models in real-world conditions. We collaborate on making both the models and the tooling better.

This kind of organic adoption extended to enterprise too. Engineers at companies like Salesforce, Samsung and SAP are using Cline to build their projects. These are organizations with some of the most demanding security and compliance requirements in the industry. They chose an open source tool because they could see exactly what it does, run it on their own infrastructure, and maintain complete control over how AI interacts with their code.

None of this was the goal when I started. But it proves something important: open source isn't just a philosophy. It's a practical advantage when you're asking developers to trust AI with their most sensitive work.

That cycle, developers building something useful, other developers making it better, success creating opportunity for everyone involved, is exactly what we want to keep going.

Announcing the Cline Open Source Grant: $1 million to fund your projects

Five million installs means millions of developers who took a chance on a tool that started as a weekend project. That community deserves the same support we got: the freedom to build something they believe in.

We're committing $1 million to fund open source projects. We're not paying you to build our project. We're paying you to build your open source project.

This isn't about growing the Cline ecosystem. It's about growing the open source ecosystem. If your project makes developers more productive, improves AI tooling, or pushes the boundaries of what's possible with agentic workflows, we want to fund it. The project doesn't need to integrate with Cline. It doesn't need to use our stack. It just needs to be open source and genuinely useful to developers.

What we're looking for: developer tools that solve real problems, AI infrastructure that enables new workflows, agentic systems that push the state of the art, and anything else that makes building software better. We're especially interested in projects from developers who haven't had access to traditional funding. Solo developers, small teams, people building in their spare time. Those are exactly the kinds of projects we want to support.

Grant amounts will range from $1,000 to $10,000 dollars in credits depending on the scope and ambition of your project. We'll review applications on a rolling basis and announce the first round of recipients within 60 days.

How to apply: fill out the application form at cline.bot/oss-grant. Tell us what you're building, why it matters, and how the grant would help you get there. Applications open next week and will remain open throughout.

We're also planning an in-person event to bring this community together and celebrate the projects that get funded. Details are still coming together, but expect something in the next few weeks. For those who can't travel, we'll host a virtual event with a preview of what's next for Cline and a showcase of grant recipients.

If you're working on something that could use funding, apply. If you know someone who should apply, send them this post. Tag your favorite open source maintainer. Share this with your developer community. The whole point of this grant is to reach people who wouldn't normally have access to funding and we need your help to find them.

What this milestone actually means

When I built that first version in a garage, I had no idea it would turn into this. The hackathon judges didn't think it was the best demo that weekend. But developers did. And they kept telling their friends.

That's always been the pattern. Someone builds something useful. Other developers make it better. Success creates opportunities for more people to build. The next chapter of Cline isn't being written by us alone, it's being written by the 57,000 developers who starred the repo, the contributors who ship improvements every week, the enterprises who trust it with production code, and the developers who are building the next generation of tools with the grants we'll fund.

Somewhere right now, there's a developer in their garage with an idea that needs to exist. We want to help make that happen.

We're just getting started.