We are grateful for donations that help us ensure the sustainable development of Reunicorn and strengthen our independence. We are working towards accepting privacy friendly monetary gifts via GNU Taler later this year.
In the meantime, or if you just want to strengthen the framework Reunicorn is built on, we can recommend donations to the Veilid foundation. Because without Veilid we would not be able to create Reunicorn, so we are happy to share your appreciation with them: https://veilid.com/donate/
We aim for transparency regarding what your valued financial contribution is used for. Because even with a community deciding to develop and maintain software in their spare time without monetary compensation, there come costs with bringing an app to market.
Initial setup costs include around 3,500 EUR for setting up all the legal bits, privacy policy, terms and conditions appropriately.
Recurring annual costs mainly consist of:
And while we love the open source and free software community spirit, just relying on the financial privilege of individuals to contribute their time is not sufficient for us when it comes to ensuring that compatibility and security critical updates reach the Reunicorn users timely. Therefore, we are aiming to fund basic maintenance work for on average four 40h work weeks per year with a budget of around 16,000 EUR before social security and tax deductions, which effectively halve what could be paid to developers, amounting to an hourly wage of around roughly 50 EUR before income tax.
With all that considered, we currently estimate that sustainable maintenance of Reunicorn costs ~16,900 EUR annually.
Showing users ads and thereby exposing them to tracking is not compatible with our commitment to protecting our users’ privacy. Equally so, selling user data to third parties for profit will not happen. That means we need to rely on Reunicorn users to financially support the continued maintenance of the app.
To fund the development of additional features we apply for grants offered by government agencies, or rely on the time contributions of individual developers, designers, writers and other supporters.