If you mostly follow AI tools through chat apps and you are trying not to fall behind, this is the kind of page that can quietly waste your time. You open a GitHub Sponsors page, see pricing boxes in your head, and assume the first job is to name perks. You were ready to scroll past it, but you also do not want to miss the one thing that actually changes your decision. In the Calesthio case, that is the wrong first move.
My take is simple: Sponsor pages should explain the work before the perks. This is not an argument against tiers. It is an argument about order. Most people default to the storefront version: tiers, prices, small rewards, neat labels. An update is not worth your attention because it lists more features. It is worth your attention if it changes your next move.
GitHub's own Sponsors docs point in that direction. Tiers, meaning the paid options people can choose, are optional, and you can still add up to 10 one-time tiers and 10 monthly tiers later [S004]. The profile guidance also says to tell people what open-source work you do, what their support will fund, and lets you feature up to six repositories [S003]. That is a project story first, not a perk catalog first.
The OpenMontage example makes the same point from the page structure. Its README is already doing the persuasion work: sample output, cost, workflow, and where to go next all show up before the sponsor call to action [S001]. That matters because many beginners think the Sponsor button is where conversion starts. Often it starts earlier. So if a Calesthio sponsor page feels weak, the first draft to fix is usually the intro and the README framing, not the reward table.
If you are building one of these pages, write three lines before you touch pricing: what you are making, what support unlocks, and which repo or result people should look at first. Then add tiers if they help. Share this with anyone turning a Sponsors page into a mini membership shop. That is the version worth passing on because it gives a usable rule, not just another tool update. The mistake is not using tiers. The mistake is leading with tiers.