Open infrastructure has a bill
CrystalDocs builds and hosts API documentation for every published Crystal shard, generated from the source of a tagged release and rendered here, with scripting off. The Bushido Collective maintains it and pays for it out of pocket. Sponsorship covers the infrastructure bill.
What the money pays for
No invented figures. These are the real cost drivers, and each one grows with the ecosystem rather than with our ambitions.
- The build sandbox. Every tagged release of every shard triggers a build: the Crystal compiler's own documentation generator runs against that tag inside a locked down job with no network and no credentials, because a shard's macros can execute code at compile time. That confinement is why these pages are safe to serve, it runs once per release, and it is billed per run.
- Storage. Object storage keeps one machine-readable documentation build for every version of every shard. Every tag anyone pushes adds one, and none of them are deleted.
- Compute. The documentation host and its three sibling services run on Cloud Run, metered by the request and by the CPU-second, so a busier ecosystem costs more to serve.
- The database. Cloud SQL holds the build records and package metadata these pages are rendered from. It is sized to stay fast as the archive grows, not to be cheap on the day it was provisioned.
- Bandwidth and the small print. Serving documentation, plus DNS, logging and monitoring. Individually small, never zero.
What sponsorship does not buy
Sponsorship does not buy influence over what CrystalDocs builds, hosts, or shows. Every tagged release gets the same build, the same templates, and the same place in the URL structure whether its author sponsors or not. Documentation is not promoted, demoted, or reordered for money, and there are no sponsored placements anywhere on the site, at any tier. If that ever changes, it changes on this page first.
Who you are paying
CrystalDocs is built and maintained by The Bushido Collective, the same small group of working engineers behind CrystalShards, CrystalGigs and CrystalBits. It is not a foundation and there is no staff: the people who write the code are the people who answer the pager.
How to sponsor
Sponsorship is not open yet. We are still deciding where contributions should go, and when the decision is made this page is where the link will appear. Until then, the most useful thing you can do is read the documentation and publish shards worth documenting.