Free of Charge, No Donations

GpgFrontend is free. You pay nothing. Not now, not later.

There is no paid version. There are no locked features. There is no donation button. None of this will change.

Why Is It Free?

The goal of this project is simple: everyone should be able to keep their private things private.

“Everyone” also means people who have no money. And people who live in places where paying for a privacy tool could get them in trouble. If the tool had a price, it would fail exactly the people who need it most.

The license (GPL-3.0) makes the code free forever: anyone may read it, change it and share it. Nobody can take that away.

The zero price is our own promise on top of that: the official app will never cost money.

Why No Donations?

Most free projects still ask for money. This one does not want any. Here is why:

• Money creates debts. If you give money, the project owes you something. With no money, the project owes nothing to anyone, and every choice is made for the users only.
• Money changes the reason for working. This project is built because building it feels worth doing. Money would slowly replace that reason with a worse one.
• Money makes paperwork. Taking donations means bank accounts, taxes and legal rules. All that time is better spent on the software.
• Money weakens trust. This is a security tool. A tool is easier to trust when it wants nothing from you. Not your money, not your data, nothing.

Who Pays for It, Then?

The maintainer does. The project costs real money and many years of work, and the maintainer covers all of it.

Think of it this way: the donation goes in the other direction. It goes from the maintainer to the world. Making something useful for everyone, and asking for nothing back, is the maintainer’s way of being a useful member of humanity. That feeling is the payment, and it is enough.

And to be honest: even if you wanted to pay, you could not. At normal engineering rates, the working hours in this project cost far more than any donation button would ever collect. It is simpler to call it what it is: a gift.

Is Someone Asking You for Money?

Then it is not us. This project never charges anything and never collects donations.

The license lets other people share the code, even for a price. That may be legal, but you never need to pay anyone. The same app is always free on the official Downloads page, and you can check your copy is real with Code & Binary Verify.

Want to Help Anyway?

These things help more than money would:

• Star it on GitHub. That is the official donation button. :)
• Report bugs. A clear bug report, with the steps to repeat it, is a real gift.
• Translate the app into your language.
• Contribute code, or fix a page in this manual.
• Tell someone. The project grows when the people who need it hear about it.