Support us
Free to use. Not free to make.
Everything here is given away — 33 projects, no accounts, no licence keys, no upsell. That is deliberate and it is not changing. But "free to you" and "free to produce" are very different things, and it is worth being straight about the gap.
Since you were going to ask
Yes, we use AI, and heavily. It is why one working technician can ship tools across audio, video, lighting, RF and networking at this rate, and we say so on every repo rather than quietly hoping you don't notice.
What it does not do is make the work free. It is a metered subscription that arrives every month. It does not buy the amplifier you need on the bench to find out what the protocol actually does. It does not pay for the fab run of a board revision that turns out to be wrong. And it does not review its own output — that is still hours of a human reading every line before it goes anywhere near a show.
Where the money actually goes
- 01
Hardware to test against
You cannot reverse-engineer a control protocol from a datasheet. Every bridge, monitor and fleet tool here exists because someone bought, borrowed or hired the actual box and watched what it said on the wire.
- 02
Boards that do not work yet
Open hardware means fab runs, stencils, parts reels and prototypes — including the revisions that turn out to be wrong. Rev A is rarely the one you ship.
- 03
AI tooling
The assistance that makes this pace possible is metered and it is not cheap. It is a monthly bill, not a one-off.
- 04
Everything around the code
Build machines, CI minutes, test VMs, signing, hosting, domains. The unglamorous line items that turn a repo into something you can actually download and run.
- 05
The hours
The largest cost by a distance, and the one nobody invoices for. Written between calls, on the way home, and on days off — for tools given away to people who will never know who wrote them.
Ways to help
Pick whichever suits youGitHub Sponsors
One-off or monthly, no extra account. Goes straight to the work.
OpenPatreon
Monthly support with tiers, changelog notes and early builds.
OpenLiberapay
Non-profit, open-source funding platform. No platform cut.
OpenKo-fi
One-off tips, if a tool saved you an afternoon.
OpenCosts you nothing
- Star the repos. It is the only signal that tells anyone these tools exist.
- File the bug. A real report from a real gig is worth more than a donation.
- Tell us it worked. Knowing a tool ran a show is genuinely why the next one gets written.
- Pass it on. To the tech next to you who is still doing it by hand.
No pressure either way
Nothing is paywalled, nothing is crippled, and nothing ever will be. If you can help, it goes straight back into the next board and the next tool. If you can't, use it all anyway — that was always the point.