Sponsors
One person builds this.
Sponsorship keeps it independent.
VayuPress is a single signed binary that replaces a website stack, a mail provider and a chat service — website & blog, VayuMail, VayuTalk, bot protection, analytics, PGP, an API, an MCP server and one-click Tor, self-hosted on hardware you control. No tracking, no phone-home, no venture capital, no plan to ever charge for the core.
That independence is the point — and it is also the funding model's weakness. There is no company behind this. Sponsorship is how the work continues at the pace it has: security audits answered with fixes, contributor PRs reviewed within a day, and signed releases shipped continuously.
What sponsorship funds
- → Full-time development. The goal is $5,000/month — the line where this stops competing with paid work and becomes the work. That is the whole reason the number exists: it is not a valuation, a revenue target, or a price anyone owes.
- → Security as a habit, not an event. Recent months: a full audit remediated finding-by-finding, mail account recovery designed and adversarially tested, bot protection rebuilt to never lock out a human.
- → Infrastructure that stays yours. Signed binaries, cosign verification, reproducible releases, live test servers — the unglamorous costs of software people trust with their mail.
Where the project stands
The honest part
Sponsoring does not buy priority features, private support or a say in the roadmap — the ADR process decides that, in public. What it buys is continuation: the same person who answered the last security report being around to answer the next one.
And it does not buy the licence.
VayuPress is Apache-2.0, permanently and unconditionally. That is settled and is not tied to the $5,000 figure above, or to any figure. If this goal is never reached, nothing changes — the project stays free, stays Apache-2.0, and stays maintained part-time. It does not get sold, relicensed or made source-available.
That ordering is the point. A project that would change its terms under financial pressure has not decided anything — it has only decided what it will do while things are going well. Read the pledge and what backs it.
If money is not on the table, the other things that genuinely help: run it, report what breaks, and tell one person who is tired of renting their website from a platform.