← Umbraculum

Support & sponsorship

Umbraculum is community-first in what gets built and honest about capacity (architecture, maintainer time, AI compute). At public alpha this is a solo-maintained project — collaboration is the highest-leverage ask; financial and in-kind sponsorship are optional.

Collaborate (highest leverage)

Code, reviews, documentation, tests, accessibility work, and execution plans in the umbraculum-dev monorepo (platform, canonical modules, verticals) compound for every future contributor. The open-source umbraculum-toolset Cursor plugin pack is a sister repo — rules, skills, and subagents that keep AI-assisted contributions aligned with the same CI bar.

Start with Getting started, community forum, and CONTRIBUTING.md.

Financial sponsorship (optional)

Help carry AI inference, maintainer time, and infrastructure so the project can ship more of what the community has already voted on — not what a sponsor privately prefers.

At public alpha, operational maintainability — keeping the forum, demo host, and public surfaces reachable — runs on very modest fixed infrastructure: about €9–15/month depending on forum backup phase (forum bootstrap is ~€4/month VPS-only). The lights-on burden stays small; keeping the project running is realistically affordable without jackpot-scale funding.

Fixed infrastructure costs today:

Core maintainer AI tooling (reference baseline):

Separate from forum/demo VPS costs above, the core team’s day-to-day development uses Cursor Ultra at about $200/month on average, plus about $100/month in additional frontier-model API usage beyond what the plan includes. This is the best quantity-without-sacrificing-quality setup the core team has been able to choose — tested incrementally since December 2025 and working very well for AI-orchestrated contribution at the project’s CI bar. It is not a minimum for contributors (many tasks need no paid tier); it explains what recurring sponsorship helps sustain when you earmark funds for maintainer capacity.

At bootstrap, forum and demo may run on maintainer-operated provisional VPS infrastructure. When the community votes to move to Umbraculum entity-owned hosting, migration is backup + restore and DNS cutover — not transfer of the existing VPS between accounts. See CORE-DEVELOPMENT-AND-COMMUNITY.md §4.6.7.

Recurring — Liberapay One-time — Buy Me a Coffee

Phase 0 channels. Adding payment rails (e.g. GitHub Sponsors, Open Collective) requires a community proposal and vote when documented triggers fire — see Core development and community §5.

Forests, energy, and AI

Umbraculum is built by humans and with AI assistance. That uses real energy — and we name that worry openly, not as politics but as admiration for forests (North American landscapes and forest ecosystems worldwide) and a modest response:

Not a claim of carbon neutrality — a committed floor. Open discussion welcome on the forum. Full policy: Donation channels §9.

In-kind — compute, API usage, infrastructure

Payment buttons move cash only. There is no standard “donate API tokens” checkout for open-source projects.

If you want to sponsor AI inference or Cursor/API usage:

We do not accept shared API keys or credentials by email or chat. Earmarks (“for inference costs”) are welcome as information; they do not buy queue priority (§5.3).

What sponsorship does not buy

Sponsorship can buy:

Sponsors

No public list yet. Names appear here only with explicit consent, in random order so no precedence is implied, and without amounts.

Full policy

Authoritative text: Core development and community (§5) · operational runbook: Donation channels.