3 EUR
One day of servers
90 EUR
One month, everything included
What it costs to keep running
A server, its bandwidth, the domains, and the mail infrastructure that has to stay reachable at three in the morning. That is about 90 euro a month, which is three euro a day.
The figure is published rather than described, and the running total for the current month is on the donation page inside the app. It is deliberately a small number: a service that costs little is a service that can survive a bad month without asking anybody for a subscription.
What a donation buys
Nothing. That is not modesty, it is the design.
There is one tier and everybody is on it. Replies, your own domains, unlimited aliases and every feature added later are already yours. A donation does not add a badge, raise a limit, move you up a queue or change a single thing about your account.
The moment paying changes what the service does for you, the free version becomes the version we have a reason to make worse. Keeping the two completely separate is the only way to promise that it will not happen.
Donations are not attached to accounts
Nothing links a payment to a user. Card payments go through a third party that never learns which account, if any, the donor has; crypto payments carry no account reference at all.
A consequence worth stating: we cannot thank you by name unless you tell us to. The donation wall in the app is opt-in and typed in by hand, which is why it is a wall of names rather than a ledger of payments.
Ways to give
Card
Through Ko-fi, which handles the payment. Nothing about the donor reaches us, and no account is involved.
Bitcoin
On-chain, to a published address. Nothing is recorded here beyond the amount and the date. Lightning arrives when our own BTCPay server does.
Ethereum, BNB Chain and Solana
Their own addresses, plus the usual stablecoins on Ethereum and BNB Smart Chain. Each one says which network it is, because the wrong network is how coins get lost.
Monero
An address you can send to directly, and the one that suits this service best: nothing about a Monero payment is public, so there is nothing for us to know about the donor even by accident.
All of them are on one page: app.skudo.org/donate. No account is needed to open it or to give.
Things worth more than money
- Behave well. One account sending junk gets our shared domains blocked, and that breaks every alias for every user at once. An account that stays clean is worth more to this service than most donations.
- Report what is broken. A rude bug report beats a polite silence. Open a ticket.
- Tell one person. The service grows by word of mouth because it does not buy advertising, and it does not buy advertising because there is nothing to sell you.
If the money stops
The bill gets paid for as long as that is possible. If it stops being possible you will hear it plainly and early rather than discovering it: ninety days of notice before the service shuts down, which is the same commitment made in the transparency report and in the terms.
Anything you cannot afford to lose belongs on a domain you own. That is true of every mail provider, including this one, and saying so is part of the same argument as the rest of this page.