Thank you so much for helping us reach our initial funding goals!

Published on November 29, 2025 by Kat Marchán

Thanks to all y'all, we've been able to reach our (initial!) funding goal of $500/mo, with an added bonus of a $200/mo corporate sponsorship from Elide. In the meantime, we're also looking at applying grants to help support our development more directly and weightily.

In the meantime, what have we spent the money on? Things are still in the early days and we're working on kicking off, but you've already made it possible for us to:

Pay the artist who did a lot of our logo work, and pay him fairly and generously, at a time when he was about to be affected by the recent SNAP benefit cutoff in the United States due to the "shutdown".
Pay to consult with a Product/UX expert on bootstrapping a Product/UX team in our project, now titled the "Alchemist Circle". Thanks to her, we were able to recruit a couple of Product/UX experts of our own with nearly 30 years of combined experience, and we're about to kick off the team—meaning the products we put out there will have professional-quality design and UX work put into them, and product direction will also be expertly guided, rather than leaving Conjured Ink to be an open source engineer-led effort (which can be... tricky to keep usable).
Hold a contest for emotes for our Discord in celebration of 1k followers for our Bluesky account. This gives money directly back to the community we're serving by fairly compensating creatives. There are many ways to support creatives and giving them money for their work is just an excellent way to do so.
Purchase some hardware for an experimental "market stall appliance" idea that we've been chewing on. Think "pay $80 for a thing you shove in your closet that hosts your shop and don't worry about hosting fees ever again".
Email/calendar/contact accounts for everyone in our core organization, which has made it SO much easier to communicate and coordinate meetings, as well as given us a much more legitimate public face. We'll all have <name>@conjured.ink emails going forward, along with several important aliases (like [email protected]!) that organizations are usually expected to have.
Spin up hosting for various self-hosted services for things that have allowed us to operate better, in general, like a documents service, an organizational password manager, and our ever-important Loomio, where we make all our important decisions.

...and we've managed to do all this with room to spare! Some of these expenses haven't quite landed yet, but as always you can see all our expenses right on our OpenCollective page. We're committed to full transparency with where the money that comes in actually goes.

Finally, a note on our plans to spin up a separate entity: For the time being, these are postponed, as after consultation with a lawyer and others we realized that staying under Open Source Collective (our Fiscal Host) would allow us to do nearly everything we want to do in the medium-term, without spending our early funds on company formation expenses that would gain us little to nothing by comparison. We can even eventually have full-time employees without ever leaving Open Source Collective! We'll keep y'all up to date as needs and plans change, but for the time being, this will remain our home, and the funds from the community will go towards more immediate, active needs that will help us grow faster, sooner, and more effectively.

Thank you all again, and a thousand times over, for all you've given us, and for making all these things possible. We'll be hosting our first official internal elections mid-December, and January 1st will be our first day operating as a fully-democratic organization, so you can look forward to more updates from the new Shadow Circle (aka Joint Council) once it's elected, and any changes that might bring in the coming year.

-kat

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