There is no paid tier.
Here's how that holds.
"Free" is a promise about the future, and most projects that make it have a business model quietly working against it. This page is the arithmetic: what it costs to run, where the money comes from, and what happens when that stops.
Apache-2.0, irrevocably
Every release is licensed at publication. A licence already granted can't be withdrawn, so every version you've installed stays free regardless of anything we decide later.
No contributor licence agreement
We deliberately don't collect the rights that would let us relicense. About 40% of the codebase is contributed, and we couldn't make it proprietary without 340 people's permission.
No investors
Nobody holds equity that needs a return. The pressure that turns open projects into open cores doesn't exist here, because the cap table doesn't exist here.
It costs about €94,000 a year.
Two maintainers at roughly half-time, plus infrastructure. That's the whole budget, and it's published quarterly in FUNDING.md with actual figures where most projects put a thermometer graphic.
| Cost | Per year |
|---|---|
| Two maintainers, part-time stipend | €72,000 |
| CI minutes and benchmark GPU time | €14,400 |
| Docs hosting, domain, package registries | €2,100 |
| Annual third-party security review | €5,500 |
| Total | €94,000 |
And it takes in about €101,000.
A surplus of roughly €7,000, which sits in a buffer account covering about eleven weeks. That's thin, and we'd rather say so than imply stability we don't have.
| Source | Per year |
|---|---|
| GitHub Sponsors — 1,240 individuals | €38,000 |
| Corporate sponsors — 9 companies | €41,000 |
| NLnet grant, ends 2027 | €18,000 |
| Support retainers — 3 organisations | €4,000 |
| Total | €101,000 |
Money doesn't buy merges.
Sponsors get
- A logo on the README and this site, if they want one
- A monthly written update on where the money went
- Priority on triage — their issues get read first
- An hour a month with a maintainer, if they use it
Sponsors do not get
- Features merged because they asked and paid
- A private fork, an early build, or an exclusive anything
- A vote in governance or a seat on the maintainer team
- Any influence over the roadmap that a non-sponsor lacks
Support retainers, stated plainly
Three organisations pay for guaranteed response time and help with their own deployments. This is the closest thing to commerce here, and it's worth naming the risk: paid support can create a quiet incentive to leave the software confusing. Our check on that is crude but real: every support question that took more than one exchange becomes a documentation issue, and we publish the count each quarter.
Four ways, only one involves money.
Contribute
The highest-value thing by a distance. 62 good first issues are open and labelled with a file to start in.
How to startAnswer someone
Most Discord questions are answered by people who aren't maintainers. That's the difference between a project and a product.
Join DiscordSponsor individually
€3 a month from 1,240 people is the largest single line in the budget. Cancel any time; nothing degrades if you do.
GitHub SponsorsSponsor as a company
If your company depends on this, €200–1,500 a month is cheaper than the alternative and considerably cheaper than maintaining a fork.
Talk to usThe questions sponsors actually ask
Maintenance slows and eventually stops. Nothing you've installed breaks, the licence doesn't change, and the fork rights are permanent, but new releases would stop. The governance page names a succession plan and a second organisation holding publishing keys, so an abandoned project can be picked up rather than left to rot.
Not from us. A hosted product would create exactly the incentive we're trying to avoid. Every hour spent on it is an hour not spent on the thing you self-host, and eventually the self-hosted version becomes the demo. If someone else wants to host it, the licence permits that and we'd link to them.
Because the returns venture capital needs are incompatible with a tool that runs on your laptop and never phones home. Taking it would mean building something to charge for, and the only things left to charge for are the parts that should stay free. We'd rather be small and permanent.
You can pay a contractor to build it and open a PR like everyone else, and we'll review it on merit. Several connectors arrived this way. What you can't do is pay us to merge something, because the moment that works the roadmap belongs to whoever has the most money.
It's permissive with an explicit patent grant, usually the box legal wants ticked. Use it commercially, modify it, ship it inside a product, no copyleft obligation. Full text on the licence page.
Eleven weeks of runway.
That's the real number. If Quire is load-bearing for you, a small recurring sponsorship makes it considerably less real.