Pimalaya is free software, funded by the people who rely on it
Grants pay for named pieces of work, for a fixed period. Partnerships pay for what a company needs from us: its servers tested, its bugs first. Donations pay for everything else, and everything after. 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 the paperwork needs nothing from the project.
Or choose another route
- 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. Building on Pimalaya, or running a mail service? See the partnerships instead.
What you are funding
- 75+repositories
- 15+apps
- 30+libraries
- 4domains: email, contacts, calendars, time
Most of that count is the layer nobody sees, I/O-free Rust libraries written from the RFCs up, 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, and time is exactly what grants and donations buy. Every hour on a protocol edge case, a provider's quirk, a bug you reported, exists because somebody funded it. Sponsorship is what turns your use of these tools into more of those hours.
Sponsorship also pays for dedicated accounts at Microsoft and Google, so every release is tested against the real services, end to end, without ever touching anyone's data.
What grants already cover
Pimalaya has been funded for years by these two, and that support is real. What a grant cannot cover is everything that is not a deliverable: the issues answered, the regressions chased, the crates kept released, the next protocol nobody wrote a call for. That is the part sponsorship pays for.
Other ways to contribute
Money is not the only thing that keeps this going, and time given directly is worth as much as time bought. 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.