ELGODS is free, with no ads and no paywall, forever. This page is an honest accounting of what that costs, who pays for it today, and what real help looks like — in the spirit of the open sources it is built on.
We hold to the same line the site has always stated: no monetization. Knowledge of the sacred belongs to the communities it comes from, not behind a wall. monetization.ts unlocks every act and every character unconditionally; there is no premium tier, no upsell modal, no subscription. What this buys in trust, we intend to keep.
Free to readers, though, is not free to build. This is where that work is funded, and what is still unsolved.
The live site is served on Railway (a production and a staging environment), built on every change through GitHub Actions, and monitored with Sentry. Journal and journey progress persist in a small SQLite store. Every one of these line items sits within low-cost tiers that the solo maintainer covers out of pocket at current traffic — this is not yet a funded project, and we say so plainly.
Costs are shown as categories, not a published invoice: hosting and monitoring are metered and fluctuate with traffic, and we would rather state the shape of the bill than post numbers we have not reconciled against a ledger.
Four gaps that time alone cannot close — each is real cash, not effort.
With your knowledge — the cheapest and most valuable currency here. Review an entry, add a citation, translate a telling, or contribute a correctly-licensed temple photograph through the contribution paths. A few hundred guardian sign-offs would move 485 drafts closer to trustworthy.
As a tradition or institution — temple trusts, monasteries, libraries, and universities that want their own texts and sites documented with provenance are the natural partners for the review network and the sound budget. Write through the Advisory Council page.
With code — everything, content and engine alike, is open at github.com/pmaero-byte/ELGODS. The provenance and test gates make outside contributions safe to merge.
Like Wikipedia, ELGODS is free for everyone, forever. If you find value here and wish to help sustain it, every contribution goes directly to the gaps listed above. There is no paywall, no premium tier, and no feature locked behind a payment — your donation simply keeps the lights on and the work moving.
UPI (recommended for India): the fastest way to give — no fees, no account needed. Open any UPI app and scan or use the link below.
Donations are voluntary and non-refundable. ELGODS is not a registered NGO; contributions are gifts to the project, not tax-deductible donations. You will never be asked to pay for content that is currently free.
No ads beside the sacred, no selling devotee data, no paid “priority” to a deity or a tradition, no ranking one sampradāya above another, and no AI-generated deity imagery standing in for the real thing. When the budget binds, the answer is to build less or to ask honestly — never to quietly change what ELGODS is. The full source and attribution ledger is public in the repository.