MarkLayer is free for everyone and it will stay free. I pay for the servers myself. If the tool has saved you an hour of screenshots and Slack threads, you can pay what you like towards that bill, once. It buys you nothing. That is the point, and it is what makes it fair to ask.
Running this is cheap, and that is on purpose: an annotation is a small JSON payload, a share link is a row in a database, and a collaboration room only exists while someone is standing in it. There is no video to transcode and no per-user storage tier to fund. But cheap is not free, and the bill has four lines.
Cloudflare Workers Paid. A Durable Object is what holds a live annotation room together, and Durable Objects only exist on the paid plan. So there is a bill every month before the first annotation is drawn.
D1, R2 and the room hours. Shared annotations are rows in D1, share cards are objects in R2, and every collaboration session is a Durable Object awake for as long as somebody is in it. This is the part that grows with use.
A relay on a fixed address. A few hosts refuse traffic from Cloudflare’s shared egress outright. The proxy falls back to a small relay on one address I own, so those pages still load. It is a second host, so it is a second bill.
The domain. marklayer.app, renewed yearly. Small, and the only cost here that would exist even with no users.
No total is stated here because I am not going to invent one. The honest version is that it is small enough that I absorb it, and that I would rather say so than print a figure I cannot back. Every line above is checkable in the source.
What it does not buy
This is the part most "support us" pages leave vague, so it is the part stated first and in full. Paying changes nothing about your MarkLayer, or anyone else's.
No paid tier, and no plan to add one. There is nothing above the version everybody already has.
No perks: no badge, no supporter list, no priority in the issue tracker, no vote on the roadmap.
No support contract, no SLA and no faster answer than anyone else gets. There is no support desk to jump the queue on.
No account, so nothing to log into afterwards and nothing to cancel.
No mailing list. There is no email field anywhere in the product, and this does not add one.
The reason there is nothing to sell is structural rather than generous. MarkLayer is Apache-2.0, so if a paid tier ever appeared, the last free version could be forked and kept running by anybody. Seethe pricing page for that argument in full. A supporter tier would be the first crack in it, so there isn't one.
Free ways to help, which are worth as much
Money is the least interesting thing you can give a project like this. In rough order of how much each one actually moves:
Leave a Chrome Web Store review. The listing is how people find the extension at all, and a handful of honest reviews change that more than anything on this site does.
Star the repository, or read it. A star is the cheapest signal that a free tool is worth trusting.
Correct a page. The comparisons and alternatives make factual claims about other companies' products, and when one goes out of date I want to know. The corrections policy is on the about page.
Send it to the one person you know who is still emailing screenshots with red arrows drawn in Preview. That is how nearly everybody here arrived.
How the payment works
The checkout is pay-what-you-want with a $3 floor, and $5 filled in. It is one payment, not a subscription, so there is nothing recurring and nothing to cancel.
Polar is the merchant of record and handles the payment, the tax and the receipt. None of it touches MarkLayer's servers, and I never see a card number. Polar adds VAT on top where it applies, so the total at $5 is $6.15 in the EU. That is why no button on this page names a price: quoting one the checkout then contradicts would be a small lie.
The receipt arrives by email from Polar. If something is wrong with a payment, write to hello@marklayer.app and I will sort it out.