Field desk // Funding

Keep the archive up

BUFFMAP has no ads, no Advertising ID, and no data to sell. That is a deliberate choice, and it means the running costs have to come from somewhere else. Here is exactly where.

What it costs to run

The archive is cheap to run but not free. The recurring costs are:

Edge hosting and the API — Cloudflare Workers, KV, and D1 serving api.buffmap.app.
Image storage — every archived piece is kept at full resolution, and storage only ever grows. This is the line that scales with the archive.
Store fees — Google Play and Apple developer program fees, billed yearly.
The domain — buffmap.app, billed yearly.

We publish cost categories rather than a running total. If that changes, it will change here first.

Ways to help

Nothing on this page asks you to identify yourself to BUFFMAP. Options are ordered by how much of your anonymity they preserve.

Worth more than money

Use the app

A documented piece, and a documented buff, is the thing the archive is actually made of. Nothing you can send us is worth more than a wall nobody else recorded.

Join the San Diego pilot

Costs nothing

Put it in front of someone

The pilot grows by word of mouth, not ad spend — there is no ad spend. If you know a writer, a muralist, or an archivist in San Diego, send them here.

Share the archive

Not open yet

Contribute money

Anonymous contribution rails are being set up, and are deliberately not live until they work end to end. When they open, they will be options that ask nothing of you: no account, no name, no email.

Ask about funding

This page will list live contribution methods the day they exist, and not one day sooner. Nothing here is currently accepting money.

What we will never do

These are commitments, not current-state descriptions. They are the reason the funding options above look the way they do.

Run ads, or ship an Advertising ID, attribution SDK, or third-party analytics.
Sell, rent, or share the archive, location data, or any contributor record — to anyone, at any price.
Put an existing free capability behind a payment.
Require an identity, a wallet, or a payment method in order to read or contribute to the archive.
Mint, sell, or auction archived work as an NFT or token. The work belongs to the people who made it.

Planned, not yet available

An optional in-app supporter tier is being considered for after the pilot. If it ships, it would be billed by Google Play or the App Store, which means the store — not BUFFMAP — would hold the payment identity. It is not built, not priced, and not accepting money. This page will say so plainly when that changes.

Questions

For anything about funding, receipts, or sponsorship, email support@buffmap.app. For everything else, use the support desk.