Open infrastructure has a bill
CrystalShards indexes every tagged release of every published Crystal shard and serves the dependency data the ecosystem builds on. 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.
- Compute. Four services run on Cloud Run: this registry, the documentation host, the job board and the writing. They are metered by the request and by the CPU-second, so a busier ecosystem costs more to serve.
- The database. Cloud SQL holds every shard, version, dependency link and crawl record the registry has ever indexed. It is sized to stay fast as that grows, not to be cheap on the day it was provisioned.
- Storage. Object storage keeps every published package tarball and one documentation build for every version of every shard. Every tag anyone pushes adds to it, and none of it is deleted.
- The build sandbox. Every documentation build compiles a third party shard 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 what makes the hosted documentation safe to serve, it runs once per release, and it is billed per run.
- Bandwidth and the small print. Serving pages and tarballs, plus DNS, logging and monitoring. Individually small, never zero.
What sponsorship does not buy
Sponsorship does not buy influence over what this registry indexes, ranks, or shows. Every tagged release is indexed the same way whether its author sponsors or not, and nothing about a shard's page, its place in search results, or its position in any list is for sale. Ranking comes from star counts and dependency links, which are measured from public data, not negotiated. There are no sponsored listings and no paid placement at any tier, and there will not be. If that ever changes, it changes on this page first.
Who you are paying
CrystalShards is built and maintained by The Bushido Collective, the same small group of working engineers behind CrystalDocs, 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 use the registry and publish to it.