Donate
This project has no company behind it, no investors, and nothing to upsell you. If it is useful to you and you can spare something, it goes straight into the parts that cost money.
What your money actually pays for
- Running the server. A server, its bandwidth, and the domain.
- An external security audit. The largest single line, and the one thing on the roadmap that cannot be solved by writing more code. A real audit of a protocol this size is thousands, not hundreds.
- Apple's developer programme, without which the iOS client cannot be distributed at all.
Worth being straight about what donating here does not buy you, in a way that is unusual for a thing asking for money: it does not buy you a dependency on us. The server is open source, your address is worked out from your passphrase rather than issued by us, and you can keep a mailbox on a relay somebody else runs — including your own. If this project stopped tomorrow, the people using it would keep their names and could carry on elsewhere. Money given here funds the work; it does not buy leverage over anyone who took it.
What it does not buy
Not features, not priority support, and not a say in how the protocol works. There is no donor tier and nothing is locked behind paying — someone who reads the design carefully has just as much influence as someone who sends money.
Other ways to help, which are worth more
Honestly, money is not the most useful thing most people can offer. Reading the specification and telling us where it is wrong is worth more. So is running your own server, or writing an implementation against the published vectors. See community.