Charming Seal

Charming Seal·Support

Support the work. Nobody is obliged to.

Charming Seal is free under the MIT licence and there is no paid tier planned, so nothing on this page buys you a feature, a queue position or a support contract. It buys the time to keep the thing maintained. If it has already saved you a monthly fee, that is the whole argument.

Pay what you likeOne-offCancel nothing, there is nothing to cancel
A five dollar note in the Charming Seal house style: the seal in a top hat, engraved in black on ivory.

A coffee

$5

For when it saved you an afternoon.

  • Read, used, appreciated.
  • No receipt you need to file.
Send $5
A twenty-five dollar note in the Charming Seal house style: the seal raising a glass with a fistful of banknotes.

Supporter

$25

Roughly one month of the fee you are not paying.

  • Covers an evening of maintenance.
  • Bugs get looked at by someone who ate.
Send $25
A one hundred dollar note in the Charming Seal house style: the seal in full white tie with a cane.

Patron

$100

For a shop that is genuinely earning on this.

  • Pays for a real piece of work.
  • Named in the repository, if you want to be.
Send $100
A two hundred and fifty dollar note in the Charming Seal house style, printed in reverse on black.

Benefactor

$250

For a shop this quietly runs.

  • A month of the work, not an evening.
  • Named in the repository, if you want to be.
Send $250
The checkout behind these buttons is still being set up. Until the products exist on our own instance these go to GitHub Sponsors, which works today. Saying so is cheaper than letting you click a button that goes nowhere.

Where it goes

What the money actually pays for.

No budget theatre and no roadmap held hostage. There are four things, and they are all maintenance.

Keeping up with StripePayment APIs move. Somebody has to read the changelogs and fix what breaks before your buyers find it.
Security workThe audit that opened the source was one pass. Reading the code again after every significant change is the ongoing cost.
Answering peopleIssues, questions, the occasional patch review. Slow is fine. Silent is not.
Hosting the demoThe instance that serves this checkout, so the claims on this site stay checkable.
What it does not buy. No support contract, no service level agreement, no priority on your issue, no say over what gets built. Sponsorship that quietly becomes a paid tier is how free software stops being free, and this project would rather take less money than start down that road.

Costs nothing

Four ways to help that are not money.

Most projects are short of attention rather than cash, and this one is no different.

I · STAR IT

Make it findable

A star on the repository is how the next person running a shop discovers there is an alternative to renting one. It costs a click and it is the single most useful free thing.

II · WRITE ABOUT IT

Describe your deployment

A post about what you ran it on, what broke and what you had to work out is worth more than any page we could write about ourselves, because you have no reason to flatter it.

III · ANSWER SOMEBODY

Take one issue

You have already solved the thing the person above you is stuck on. Saying so in the issue tracker is a real contribution, and it does not require a pull request.

IV · SELL WITH IT

Build shops for clients

MIT means you can deploy it for other people and keep the whole fee, with no attribution and nothing owed here. Someone earning a living on this is a better outcome than a donation.

And if you would rather not

Then don't. It is still yours.

Nothing is withheld from people who never pay, because there is nothing to withhold. Take the source, run your shop, keep every penny of what you make. That was the deal before this page existed and it does not change.

Get the source How it works →