Donate / Support Us

This platform will never charge users, show ads, or take venture capital. It runs on community money and community labor. Here is how to add yours.

Open Collective

Our transparent fiscal host publishes every expense and contribution publicly. Monthly recurring contributions fund hosting hardware, replacement parts, and shared consumables like sandpaper, blades, and fasteners.

Coming Soon

Liberapay

Recurring donations with zero platform tracking. Liberapay is a website that processes anonymous donations, which suits how this project is funded.

Now Live

Donate liberapay.com/toolslibrary

Community hardware fund

Prefer your money to become something you can hold? The hardware fund buys shared equipment the library lacks: a pressure washer, a tile saw, a stud finder set. Funded purchases are added to the public inventory and lent like any other tool.

Coordinated in the Matrix room

COMMUNITY // FUNDING GOALS

Funding Goals

Each goal has a number attached. The audit amount is itemized down to the screen count; the rest are ballpark figures. Progress gets posted in Matrix and on the wiki.

One-time

Accessibility audit

$5,000

A person works through all 34 pages and screens against WCAG 2.1 AA: every form, modal, menu, and dynamic flow. An AXE automated scan runs as a review pass, and we publish the formal report. The itemized estimate came to $4,975 (7 complex screens, 13 medium, 5 light, 9 simple); the goal is rounded to $5,000 to leave room for re-testing after fixes.

One-time

Multi-city server upgrade

$1,500

A second self-hosted Fedora CoreOS node: the machine, a UPS, and replicated storage. Requests from Kansas City, St. Louis, and whatever city joins next stop funneling through one box. The platform stays on hardware the operator can touch. No cloud, no managed hosting, no new data exposure.

Reserved pool

Bug bounty pool

$1,000

Pays researchers who find a hole and tell us before they exploit it. The surface that matters most: authentication, the proof-of-work gate, messaging, and loan handoff. Payouts and disclosures land in the transparency report, next to the warrant canary.

Rolling fund

Tool fleet: replace & expand

$800

Replaces the tools that break or wear out, and buys the ones members keep asking for, new or used. Either way the purchase goes into the public inventory and lends out like any other tool.

Per quarter

Shared consumables

$300

Restocks what gets used up: sandpaper in common grits, drill bits, saw blades. Fresh consumables are the difference between a borrowed tool that works and one that ruins the project, or the tool.

COMBINED TARGET (CONSUMABLES RECUR QUARTERLY; THE REST ARE ONE-TIME OR POOLED)

$8,600

COMMUNITY // GIVE WITHOUT MONEY

Give Without Money

Donate a tool

List a tool you own and keep it in circulation. That is the most direct way to give.

Donate code

Pull requests, bug reports, and documentation edits keep the platform free.

Where the money goes

Every funded expense falls into one of four buckets: hardware (the FCOS server, drives, replacement parts, and the tool fleet), consumables (shared wear items that keep borrowed tools safe), domain & infrastructure (DNS for tools-library.com and the self-hosted BookStack wiki), and platform hardening (the accessibility audit and the bug bounty pool). No salaries, no consulting fees, no marketing spend. Financial summaries are posted to the wiki and discussed openly in Matrix.