Paying it forward
ElfHosted's model is basically to be paid for providing the infrastructure, configuration, automation and maintenance necessary to successfully run popular open-source tools.
We acknowledge that our success in selling hosting for these apps doesn't correspond to any material support for the developers who continue to improve them, adding features and fixing bugs.
I'd like to sponsor all of the projects we support, but this is impractical given the current negative-profit, bootstrapping stage we're in. I don't want to put off sponsorship until some future, profitable state though, because that feels like too much like an "indefinite" excuse.
My current solution is this - I sponsor projects which support the entire ElfHosted infrastructure (rclone, gluetun, etc), and have included sponsorship links, whenever available, on every app's page (e.g. Prowlarr).
It's therefore left to the user re whether to sponsor / donate to the developers of the tools they use, just as it would be if they ran the tools from home, or another provider.
Projects we sponsor
| Project | Why |
|---|---|
| gluetun | Provides BYO VPN connectivity to our qBittorrent, Deluge, ruTorrent and Plex applications |
| onedr0p | Container build process inspired our own, which keeps all our applications automatically up-to-date |
| gatus | Provides our health-checking tool |
| rclone | Used to mount remote storage |
| homer | Provides our default user dashboard |
| mkdocs-material | Makes our website beautiful |
| zurg | Makes streaming from Real Debrid possible |
(confirm my sponsorship here)