Pimalaya is one person
One maintainer, and an ecosystem that keeps working for exactly as long as I can afford the time. This is where you fund it.
- GitHub Sponsors The full tier ladder, monthly or one-time. Companies are billed by GitHub and get their own receipt, so nothing is needed from me for your accounting.
- Liberapay Recurring, run by a French non-profit, and the only option here that takes no cut of its own.
- Ko-fi Monthly or one-time, and no account is needed to give once.
- Buy Me a Coffee One-time, in the smallest amounts of anything listed here.
- PayPal Direct and one-time, with no platform in between.
- thanks.dev For companies that would rather fund their whole dependency tree at once and let it work out who gets what.
Recurring support is worth more than the same amount given once: it is the only kind that can be planned around.
What you are funding
75+ repositories: Himalaya for email, Cardamum for contacts, Calendula for calendars, Neverest for sync, and underneath them the layer nobody sees, a set of I/O-free Rust libraries implementing IMAP, SMTP, JMAP, CalDAV, CardDAV, vCard, iCalendar, OAuth and SASL from the RFCs up. That substrate is why these tools work against servers that disagree with each other, and it is most of the work.
All of it is free software, MIT or Apache-2.0. No paid tier, no telemetry, no gate. That is not going to change, and no amount of sponsorship unlocks anything, because there is nothing locked.
What it costs is time. Every hour on a protocol edge case, a provider's quirk, a bug you reported, is an hour not billed elsewhere. Sponsorship converts your use of these tools into time I can spend on them: the difference between a project I maintain and a hobby I get to on weekends.
What grants already cover
Pimalaya has been funded for years by these two, and that support is real. It is also specific: a grant pays for a named piece of work, for a fixed period. Sponsorship pays for everything around it, the issues answered and the regressions chased and the crates kept released, none of which is a deliverable anyone can apply for.
If you cannot give money
Then give something that also costs you time. A bug report with the steps to reproduce it, a documentation fix, a packaging update for your distribution, an answer to someone else's question in the Matrix room. Telling someone the tools exist counts too. None of that is a consolation prize.