FOSS United is pleased to announce a follow-on grant of ₹7,00,000 to Rethink DNS, a FOSS DNS resolver that helps make the internet a safer and more transparent place.
Read the detailed announcement here -
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Is the right time to ask how these decisions are made?
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It’s always the right time.
- Until we have the Governance board, @fossdot and I are handling grant requests
- We have been promoting the grants program over the past year but we have only received two official requests from Indian FOSS projects - Rethink DNS and Circuitverse. We started a conversation with Rethink DNS after Day 1 of IndiaFOSS when we got to know of their massive uptick in usage - which also led to significant financial burden on the two-member team, After further discussion, the Rethink DNS team put in an official request for a grant (email to grants@fossunited.org)
- They needed funds to pay for the necessary infra that powers Rethink DNS - 3 Lakh Rupees. A one-time payment of 3 Lakhs enabled them to negotiate/claim discounted pricing for the infra
- They are in the process of figuring out commercialization (paid tiers) so we (@fossdot and I) decided to support the two devs on the project with a 4 Lakh Rupees grant, disbursed over 12 installments (1 year) - 2 LPA per developer
I mentioned Circuitverse above - they are interested in a grant to pay for their AWS infra costs. We have an in-principle approval but the comms are stuck at the moment and we are hoping to close this grant by Mar 2025. They are looking for < 1 Lakh Rupees to fund the infra that powers thousands of students to understand Electronic Engg using FOSS.
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We are happy to announce a grant of INR 20,000 towards Project Segfault, an initiative dedicated to hosting privacy-friendly frontends and other valuable public services
Read the detailed announcement here -
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We are happy to annnounce a grant of INR 50,000 towards Albony Mirror, a student run service which provides mirrors for various open-source projects and Linux distributions.
Read the detailed announcement here -
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We are happy to announce a grant of INR 9,00,000 towards Zasper, a 4X Better IDE than Jupyterlab! This grant is co-sponsored by Zerodha
Read the detailed announcement here -
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rdns dev here
Here’s the email I sent. We were desperate (which on its own isn’t a valid justification). We also wanted to continue building, and this grant offered us some breathing room, when the walls were closing in on us.
The Rethink anti-censorship project, which has in the past been awarded grants from Mozilla (2020: $12k), OSOM Inc (2022: ~$9k), and FOSS United (2023: ~$4k), has been operational since Aug 2020.
Over the past year, we’ve got extremely popular all of a sudden in Iran, Turkmenistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, the US, Germany, and Hong Kong, resulting in high amounts of traffic. Some anti-censorship / anti-surveillance projects like I2P have started using Rethink DNS’ servers in their default configuration, while others like Orbot (the Tor project), GrapheneOS, CalyxOS publicly recommend using it, increasing the load further.
Initially, the costs kept increasing from a manageable $200 to $400 to $800 to $1500 per month in Oct 2023 to $16,000 in Dec 2023 (from serving 40b+ requests) but we made improvements, and it is down to $300 today. Since we keep adding new users (est 200 per day), this cost will likely keep increasing (but hopefully not drastically as it happened in Nov/Dec 2023).
We applied for grants elsewhere (NLNet, Open Tech Fund, FUTO, Mozilla), but were unsuccessful. Cloudflare, our infra provider, agreed to waive $10k+ off the bills in March 2024. Fly, our other infra provider, didn’t.
The 2 of us who work on this project full time have been footing the bills so far.
We plan to introduce paid plans to our ~100k users next month for our custom-built anti-censorship focused “proxy network” (which is also open source) at $1/mo to help sustain the project. Optimistically, we will be able to bring in $500 (500 paid users) in the first month of launch.
We’d appreciate if FOSS United would consider us for a follow-on grant of at least 3L to help pay the infra/op bills (7L would be ideal):
- 4L for the full time developers (2 of us), to help partially cover for previous unexpected bills.
- 3L to pay both currently outstanding infra/op bills (~1.2L) and for the next 6 months (~1.3L).
Looking forward to discussing this with you.
According to Play Store stats, Rethink is at ~800k installs now (trending 500-1000 installs per day). The costs have further increased.
The “Rethink Proxy Network” (very similar in architecture to Apple’s Private Relay) is up and running on our dev branches (since Nov!). We are now waiting for Google (& Stripe) to approve our “software export” business, while we continue to fix bugs that crop up in our testing. 
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