Who sponsors developer creators, September 2026

Omar Soliman — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 12:09:37 +0000

If you sell to developers, you have probably wondered which brands actually pay creators, and whether the ones you compete with are among them. Sponsorship marketplaces will sell you a guess. The creators themselves tell you for free, one "this issue is brought to you by" at a time, if you read enough of their posts.

I run devsponsors, a directory of developer creators, and that is what it does: it reads the creators' own posts and issues, and when a creator names a sponsor in their own words, the brand goes on record with the sentence and the post it came from. No brand is listed from a guess, a media kit or a marketplace. Here is what the record says as of September 2026.

The numbers

68 brands are named as sponsors across 81 disclosures in the posts of 500 developer creators on YouTube, GitHub, Dev.to, newsletters and social platforms.
10 brands are named by two or more creators: Brilliant (3), CodeRabbit (3), Unblocked (3), AWS (2), Endor Labs (2), HubSpot (2), MongoDB (2), SerpApi (2), Viktor (2), Zapier (2).
Everyone else shows up once. A single disclosure is still a real buy, but it is not a program.

Every brand links to a page that lists the creators who named it, with the quote: every brand seen sponsoring a developer creator.

Newsletters are where the repeat buyers are

Of the 29 developer and AI newsletters in the directory, 9 name their sponsors in the body of their issues, and between them they name 34 brands. The most disclosed newsletters: Product Growth (10), The System Design Newsletter (9), AI Agents Simplified (6), Engineering Leadership (5), Ben's Bites (3), AlgoMaster Newsletter (1), ByteByteGo Newsletter (1), Jam with AI (1), SeattleDataGuy’s Newsletter (1).

That is not because newsletters sell more sponsorships than YouTube channels. It is because a newsletter writes the disclosure into every issue as text ("This issue is brought to you by HubSpot", "Thanks to AWS for partnering on this post"), where a YouTube channel says it out loud in the video and leaves the description bare. A text-based record will always see newsletters more clearly, and I say so on the page rather than pretending the video side is quiet.

The creators with the most named sponsors

Product Growth (10), The System Design Newsletter (9), AI Agents Simplified (6), Engineering Leadership (5), Ben's Bites (3), commonLuke (3), Hardware Haven (3), The Cherno (3).

Most of these are newsletters, for the reason above. The count is sponsors on record, not sponsors ever; it grows as issues are read.

What this says about developer marketing budgets

Three things stand out.

Repeat programs are rare. Ten brands with more than one creator, out of 68. Most devtool companies try creator sponsorship once. Whether that means it did not work or they never measured it, the record cannot say.
The same audience gets bought by rivals. The System Design Newsletter alone names nine brands. A brand that sponsors one issue is buying the same readers as the eight others did. If you are one of those brands, the list of who else bought that audience is a market map you did not have to pay for.
Most creators have said nothing in public. 50 of 500 creators have a sponsorship confirmed on record (a named sponsor, a rate card or a sponsorship page), 41 run posts the platform flags as paid without naming the brand, 30 invite sponsorship in a bio or link, and 378 have nothing on record either way. Nothing on record is not a no.

How the record is built

A brand enters only from a disclosure sentence in the creator's own post or issue. The sentence and the URL sit beside the name on every page and in the open dataset (CC BY 4.0). Audience figures come from the platforms' own APIs; a few independent newsletters carry the count printed on their own page and are labelled self-reported wherever it shows. Nothing is estimated. The full method is at devsponsors.com/method.

If you want the list for one question, the topic pages answer it: which companies sponsor developer creators, which developer and AI newsletters take sponsorships, and which AI YouTubers a devtool brand can sponsor.

The developer and AI newsletters you can sponsor, with their real subscriber counts

Omar Soliman — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 20:22:11 +0000

Newsletter sponsorship is the one channel where a devtool marketer can see the audience number before writing the email. Substack prints each publication's free subscriber count. Independent newsletters print theirs on an advertise page. Neither is an open rate, and I will come back to that, but both are real numbers a buyer can plan around.

I keep devsponsors, a directory of developer creators. This is the newsletter slice of it as of September 2026: 29 newsletters, 25 on Substack and 4 on their own domain.

The largest, by the number their platform or page prints

The Rundown AI, 1,700,000 self-reported subscribers; Superhuman AI, 1,500,000 self-reported subscribers; TLDR AI, 1,100,000 self-reported subscribers; SemiAnalysis, 315,000 free subscribers; The System Design Newsletter, 251,000 free subscribers; Product Growth, 240,000 free subscribers; Deep Learning Weekly, 224,000 free subscribers; Latent.Space, 198,000 free subscribers.

Two kinds of number are mixed in that list, and the directory keeps them apart. A Substack count is stated by Substack, not by the author. A count on a newsletter's own advertise page is the publication's own claim, so it is labelled self-reported on every row, it never ranks against a platform count, and the page links the exact place it was read from. The full list, with the label on each, is at developer and AI newsletters you can sponsor.

Who already sponsors them

9 of the 29 name their sponsors in the body of their issues, and between them they name 34 brands. The most disclosed: Product Growth (10), The System Design Newsletter (9), AI Agents Simplified (6), Engineering Leadership (5), Ben's Bites (3), AlgoMaster Newsletter (1), ByteByteGo Newsletter (1), Jam with AI (1), SeattleDataGuy’s Newsletter (1).

The disclosures come in a few shapes, and I read them as they are written: "This issue is brought to you by HubSpot", "This newsletter is sponsored by Unblocked", "(Thanks to AWS for partnering on this post.)", or a "Brought to you by:" header followed by one brand per line. Each brand links to the creators who named it, with the sentence, so a buyer can see which rivals already bought a given list before asking for the rate.

Across all developer creators, 10 brands sponsor two or more, and most of those repeat buys are in newsletters: Brilliant (3), CodeRabbit (3), Unblocked (3), AWS (2), Endor Labs (2), HubSpot (2), MongoDB (2), SerpApi (2), Viktor (2), Zapier (2).

What nobody can tell you

An open rate. Substack does not publish one, and an advertise page's open rate is the publication's own claim. The subscriber count is the size of the list, not the size of the audience that reads a given issue. Some newsletters also send some issues only to paying subscribers; the directory notes the share of recent issues that went to the whole list, because a sponsored slot in a paid-only issue reaches far fewer people than the count suggests.

Prices are the other gap. In the whole directory, only a handful of creators print a rate. Advertise pages mostly take an enquiry. The directory never estimates an audience figure, and where it shows a price estimate for a placement it is labelled as arithmetic on a public benchmark, with the arithmetic shown.

How I would use this

Start from the topic page and sort by the figure you trust: Substack counts for the platform-stated list, then the self-reported ones as a separate conversation.
Open the brands column before you email. If three rivals sponsored a newsletter last month, you have your answer about whether that audience buys.
Ask for the recent send count and the free-list share, not the open rate. A publisher who answers with a screenshot is the one to work with.
Give every placement its own link so you can compare newsletters against each other, not against a benchmark.

The method behind every figure is at devsponsors.com/method, and the brands seen sponsoring developer creators, newsletter or not, are at devsponsors.com/sponsors.

DEV Community: Omar Soliman