This week I got an email I had never got before. Someone had pressed the yellow button on the support page and bought me a coffee.
I read it twice. Then I put the phone down and sat there for a bit.
Why one coffee matters
I want to be honest about the size of this. It is one coffee. It doesn’t pay for the server, it doesn’t cover the AI bill, and it won’t change anything about how OpenTodo is made. I wrote on the support page that I don’t expect anything in return and that I’m happy to keep paying for it myself. That is still true today.
But that isn’t what the email said to me. What it said was: a person, somewhere, who I have never met, uses this thing I build in my evenings, and it was useful enough to them that they went looking for a way to say so. They didn’t have to. Nothing in the app asks for it. They did it anyway.
When you build something on your own, you spend a lot of time guessing. You look at the stars on GitHub and the downloads, and they tell you people were curious. They don’t tell you whether anyone opened the app on a Monday morning and got through the day a little more calmly because of it. A coffee is a very small thing, but it is not a guess. It is one drop. It is also the first one, and until now I didn’t have any.
What I will do with it
Drink it, mostly.
Beyond that, nothing changes, and I think that is the point. OpenTodo stays free, with no paid tier and no “pro” features, as I promised. The money goes where the support page says it goes. The next bug report still gets read the day it comes in.
What does change is how the evenings feel. The last few months have been a long run of small, unglamorous work: release notes, a Play Store review, a lot of fixes nobody will ever notice because the thing they fix no longer happens. Somewhere in there it is easy to forget that there are people on the other side of it. Now I have a name in my inbox that reminds me.
Thank you
To the person who did this: thank you. I don’t know whether you will read this, and I won’t name you here, because you didn’t ask to be named. But you should know you were the first, and that I will remember it.
And to everyone else who uses OpenTodo: you don’t owe me a coffee, and you never will. If the app helps you, that is already the thing I wanted. If one day you feel like saying so, the support page is there, and so is Discord, and so is my inbox. I read all of it.