Support Wintty

Wintty is a solo project. I (Alessandro) build it on my own time, and sponsorship is what keeps it moving forward. This page explains how the tier model works, where the money goes, and how you can help if you'd like to.

If you're looking for the per-feature breakdown across tiers, the canonical reference is the Tiers page. This page is about the why.

There are three tiers. Pick the one that fits how you want to use the project.

• OSS. Free, MIT-licensed, clone from github.com/deblasis/wintty and build it yourself. No installer, no auto-updates, no handholding. Everything you need is in the repo. This tier is permanent. Nothing in OSS is artificially crippled to push you toward Sponsor or Pro.
• Sponsor. Any amount through GitHub Sponsors. You get a signed Windows installer (10/11 x64), automatic in-app updates, both stable and tip channels, and access to the sponsors-only Discord channel. Cancel anytime, you keep your current build.
• Pro. A paid tier on top of Sponsor. Includes everything in Sponsor plus persistent terminal sessions via the wintty-session CLI and the sessiond daemon. Think tmux, but native and without the multiplexer-inside-a-multiplexer awkwardness. More Pro-only features are planned; they will be announced when they ship, not before.

Note

The OSS build is the same engine that ships in Sponsor and Pro. If you build from source and configure your own update workflow, you are not missing any terminal features. Sponsor and Pro are about distribution and operational tooling, not about gating the terminal itself.

• OSS is for people who are comfortable with a Zig toolchain, want to read the code, or simply prefer building their own binaries. It is also the right choice if you cannot or do not want to support the project financially. That is fine and always will be.
• Sponsor is for people who want the app to just work. Download a signed installer, double-click, and updates land in the background. Any amount qualifies, including the minimum tier on GitHub Sponsors.
• Pro is for people who actually want the persistent-session workflow. If you have never wanted tmux or screen, Pro is probably not for you yet. If you have, you already know whether sessiond is worth it.

The honest version: I want to keep working on Wintty seriously, and that takes time and money. Sponsor revenue covers the recurring costs that come with shipping a signed Windows app to real users. Pro revenue funds the features that have ongoing operational cost beyond a one-time implementation, starting with the sessions daemon.

I considered a few alternatives before landing here.

• Pure donation model. Works for some projects, but it ties the amount of support to mood rather than to value delivered. I'd rather offer something concrete in exchange.
• Crippled OSS / paid binaries only. Hard no. The terminal itself stays open and complete. If you can build it, you can use it, fully.
• VC-backed company. Not interested. Wintty stays a solo project with a clear owner and no exit-driven pressure.

The split I landed on is: OSS gets you the engine, Sponsor gets you the convenience layer, Pro gets you the power-user layer. Each tier has a clear reason to exist.

Concretely, the money goes to:

• Release infrastructure. R2 object storage for builds, a Cloudflare Worker that gates the signed-installer downloads behind GitHub Sponsors auth, and the in-app update endpoint.
• Code signing. A code-signing certificate is not free and has to be renewed.
• Community infrastructure. The Discord bot that grants sponsors-only channel access based on GitHub Sponsors status.
• My time. Plain and simple. Hours spent on Wintty are hours not spent on other paid work.

If the project ever takes in meaningfully more than its running costs, the surplus goes back into the project itself, not into my pocket as a salary line item. I'll be transparent if and when that happens.

The simplest path:

After you become a sponsor on GitHub, head to the download page and sign in with the same GitHub account. You'll get the signed installer, and the app will handle updates from there.

Tip

If your employer offers an open-source sponsorship match or budget, GitHub Sponsors works with most of them. Worth asking.

Thanks for reading this far, and thanks to everyone who has chipped in already. It genuinely makes the difference between this being a side experiment and being a project I can keep showing up for.