Support Kinetic Notes
Kinetic Notes is free, open source, and stays that way. Nothing is held back for people who donate, and nothing is taken away from people who do not — there is no paid tier and no plan for one.
If it has earned a place in how you work and you would like to chip in, here is what that money actually does.
GitHub Sponsors handles one-off and recurring amounts. Ko-fi is there if you would rather not sign in to GitHub.
Where it goes
Four concrete things.
Not a general fund. These are the actual costs of keeping a native Mac application working.
An Apple Developer ID
A paid Apple Developer account is what allows builds to be signed and notarized, so macOS opens the app without a warning. It is a recurring annual cost and the most concrete thing donations pay for.
Testing on real hardware
Supporting both Apple Silicon and Intel natively means testing on both, across more than one version of macOS. Old Macs are cheap, but they are not free.
Unglamorous maintenance
Replacing a Carbon file layer is not fun work, and it is the kind of work that keeps an application alive across OS releases. Time spent on it is time paid for by nobody by default.
Keeping the project independent
No ads, no analytics, no subscription, no investor expecting growth. Donations are what let it stay that way rather than needing a business model.
Sustainability
Why this matters for an app like this one.
Notational Velocity did not disappear because it was bad. It stopped because maintaining a Mac application indefinitely, for free, is a lot to ask of one person — and when it stopped, the platform kept moving until a beloved tool simply would not launch any more.
That is the failure mode worth guarding against. Not a dramatic one: just an application quietly falling behind macOS until it is gone. Every OS release brings deprecations, and someone has to keep up with them.
Donations do not guarantee that never happens. They make it less likely, and they make the specific costs — a signing certificate, a test machine — stop being a reason to put work off.
Other ways to help
Money is genuinely not the only thing that is useful, and for some of these it is not even the most useful.
- Report a bug you have hit, with the steps that cause it.
- Contribute a translation, or improve one of the seven that exist.
- Send a patch — the build is one command.
- Tell someone who still opens Notational Velocity every day that Rosetta 2 is going away.
Thank you for reading this far.
Whether or not you donate — if Kinetic Notes is useful to you, that was the point.