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.
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