Donate

The data plane is mature. OpenZFS, Samba, the FreeBSD NFS server, and FreeBSD itself have decades of work behind them. The thing RealNAS adds is the management layer that turns those pieces into a NAS you can administer from a browser, on hardware you own, without a license server or an account requirement. That work takes maintainer time, build infrastructure, and hardware to test against. The project does not fund development by collecting or selling installation data, and there is no premium edition behind the free build. Donations and grants are the funding model.

The principles cost something concrete. Refusing telemetry means the project cannot sell anonymized operator data the way many free-tier products do. Refusing a paid edition means there is no upsell funnel pushing community users toward a license. Refusing closed modules means corporate add-ons cannot subsidize the maintenance the way they do for projects that take the obvious monetization shortcuts. Donations close that gap. The alternative is a project that drifts toward those shortcuts because the bills come due either way.

Every channel below sends money directly to the project. No platform skim where it is avoidable, no intermediaries between you and the maintainer for crypto, and a transparent ledger on Open Collective for fiat. Pick the option that matches your trust model and your tax situation.

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Cryptocurrency

Crypto is the preferred channel. No intermediary, no platform fee, the maintainer receives the full amount, and the privacy model matches the project's stance on telemetry. Confirm the address visually before sending. The maintainer will never DM or email asking you to redirect a donation to a new address.

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Recurring donations

Recurring support is the most valuable to the project because it lets the maintainer plan more than one quarter ahead. Three platforms cover the common preferences. Pick whichever matches your existing accounts and trust model.

GitHub Sponsors

Lowest friction if you already have a GitHub account. No platform fee. Recurring or one-time. The default for most OSS projects in this category, including Caddy, htmx, and the bulk of FreeBSD-adjacent work.

Open Collective

Full transparency ledger. Every expense the project pays from this account is public. Useful if you want to verify how donations get spent before you give, or if your company needs a fiscally-hosted recipient. Used by Immich, Vue, and several FreeBSD utilities.

Liberapay

EU-based, no platform fee, anonymous-friendly, recurring only. Matches the project's freedom posture closely. Smaller donor base than the other two but the most aligned with the no-intermediary principle.

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One-time donations

For one-off donations without a recurring commitment. Useful if you just shipped a RealNAS box and want to send something back, or if your employer reimburses one-time charitable donations.

PayPal

Largest non-technical donor base. Note: PayPal takes a 3-4% cut and has been known to freeze accounts without warning. Crypto or GitHub Sponsors is preferred when both are an option for you.

Ko-fi

Casual one-time donations. No account required for donors. Lower friction than PayPal for small amounts.

Buy Me a Coffee

Same shape as Ko-fi. Listed for donors who already have an account there.

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Sponsorship tiers

Recurring donors at the tiers below get explicit recognition and a defined channel to talk to the maintainer about priorities. Tier amounts are the same whether you pay monthly or annually. Pay through any of the recurring channels above and email sponsors@realnas.io so the project can wire up the recognition.

Tier	Amount	What it funds	Recognition
Supporter	Any recurring amount	Maintainer time on the open debt register. Smaller amounts add up faster than most people expect, and recurring is what makes them load-bearing.	Name in CREDITS.md in the source tree, opt-in.
Sustainer	$100 / month or $1,000 / year	One Sustainer covers the build VM hardware and the poudriere infrastructure for a full quarter of signed package releases.	All of the above, plus a named thanks in every release that ships during the sustained period.
Sponsor	$500 / month or $5,000 / year	One Sponsor underwrites a hardware tranche. Examples: a real HBA for storage rollback smoke, a SES-capable enclosure for the enclosure plugin, a second box for the two-node HA lab.	All of the above, plus a logo on this page, and a quarterly call with the maintainer to discuss roadmap priorities within the published roadmap.

Design partners

Several roadmap items are gated on hardware or operator-review the project does not yet have. A corporate sponsor that provides the missing piece moves the item from deferred to in progress. The current candidates with explicit unlock conditions on the roadmap are HA failover (needs a two-node SAS-attached JBOD), bhyve virtual machines (gated on the jails tranche shipping first), KMIP (needs an operator with a working KMIP deployment), Fibre Channel (needs an FC HBA), and SES enclosure management (needs a SES-aware enclosure). The full conditions for each are on the roadmap. Email sponsors@realnas.io to discuss what an arrangement looks like for your case.

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Grants

Grants are the path for organizations that fund critical open source infrastructure, privacy-respecting software, and FreeBSD-adjacent work at a tier above individual sponsorship. The project welcomes collaboration with foundations and program offices whose missions align with the freedom commitments above. An introduction from someone you know inside one of those organizations is also valuable.

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Where the money goes

Donations and grants pay for a small set of specific things. Listed here so a donor can see what they are funding before they give.

Maintainer time

The largest single line. RealNAS is one maintainer at the moment. Recurring donations buy the runway that makes ongoing work possible instead of a side project that competes with paid work.

Build infrastructure

The poudriere build VM, the smoke VM, the storage spare disks, the network lab for the open NET-002 work. All run on the maintainer's hardware today. Sustainer-tier funding upgrades that to dedicated kit.

Hardware for deferred capabilities

Real HBAs for STOR-005 SAS smoke. A SES-capable enclosure for the SES plugin. A second box for the two-node HA lab. An FC HBA for the Fibre Channel plugin. Each item is concrete and itemized.

Contractor reviews

Security review on the auth surface and the WebUI proxy before the 1.0 cut. Independent code review on the update transaction. These are not free and the project will not ship them as donor-funded line items without disclosing who did the review.

Travel for design partner reviews

Limited. Travel to an operator site to validate a deferred-capability use case in person, only when the work cannot be done remotely.

The project will publish an annual summary of donations received and how they were spent.

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Corporate sponsorship

Companies that depend on RealNAS for storage and want a stable line item to fund the work it relies on can email sponsors@realnas.io. The Sponsor tier above is the published baseline. Custom arrangements are possible for organizations with procurement requirements, invoicing, or named support windows. The architecture-contract limits apply to corporate sponsors and individual sponsors on the same terms.

Contact

sponsors@realnas.io

Individual and corporate sponsorship questions, design partner inquiries, recognition setup.

grants@realnas.io

Grant program officers and introductions from people who know one.

Donors who want to review license terms, provenance, and trademark policy before giving can read the legal page. It documents the upstream attribution to TrueNAS CORE 13.3 and zVault, the licenses for inherited code, and the project's independence from iX Systems.