01 · The studio
Activism tech support
Free technical work for Maine progressive organizations and grassroots groups. You bring the project, whether that's a site that doesn't exist yet or a spreadsheet that's quietly become a liability, and we do the technical part with you.
What we help with
- Websites
- New sites, rebuilds, landing pages, getting off a platform that's holding you hostage.
- Forms & data collection
- Intake forms, surveys, signup flows, and somewhere sane for the responses to go.
- Email & CRM
- Getting a real sending setup, list migration, picking a CRM you won't outgrow in a year.
- Accessibility remediation
- Fixing what a scan surfaced, ours or anyone else's.
- Hosting & domains
- Setting up registration, DNS, and deployment in your own accounts, and untangling whoever set it up last. You pay the registrar and host; those bills stay yours.
- Technical decisions
- A second opinion before you sign a contract or commit to a stack.
What we don't
- Paying your bills. Domains, hosting, storage, email plans, and software subscriptions are yours to buy.
- Commercial work. Businesses and larger institutions are a job for Pinebit (see below), not the free side.
- General IT helpdesk. We can't be your printer support or reset your staff's passwords.
- Ongoing managed IT or 24/7 on-call anything.
- Personal (non-organizational) projects.
- Work for organizations whose mission runs against the people this project exists to serve.
What free covers
Free means our labor. It doesn't mean we pay your bills. If your project needs a domain, hosting, storage, an email plan, or any paid service, you buy it and it goes in your organization's name, on your organization's card. We'll tell you what you need before you spend anything, keep it to the cheapest thing that works, and set the whole thing up for you.
Plenty of projects cost nothing at all. A small site on free hosting with a domain runs about $15 a year, and we'll say so up front rather than surprising you later.
How capacity works
This is free, and free means capacity is real and limited. Requests are reviewed and taken on in batches, not first-come-first-served, and not instantly. If your project is urgent, say so in the request, but an urgent request is still a request rather than a queue jump.
Bigger, or commercial?
The free side is scoped to Maine progressive organizing and grassroots groups. Businesses, larger institutions, and projects that need ongoing commitments are a job for Pinebit, a Maine software firm run by the same person, at commercial rates. Different vehicle, same standards. Municipalities that want accessibility remediation go there too, though your findings from our research are free either way.
Ready when you are.
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