Support Braided

Koha · help cover what it costs to run

Braided is free, with no subscription, no paid tier and no advertising — several of the sources it draws on are open to it on exactly those terms. If it has been useful, you can help cover what it costs to run.

What it actually costs

Not much, and that’s by design. One small rented server collects from every source on a schedule; the results are published as static files behind a CDN, which is where the app reads them from. Nothing scales with the number of people using it, so the bill is roughly the same whether ten people or ten thousand open the map today.

• Server — the database, the scheduler, the alerts, and a backup of all three$8.40/mo
• braided.co.nz$25/yr
• Apple Developer Program$165/yr
• Google Play registration, one‑off$40
• Storage, CDN, bandwidth — including every offline region downloaded$0
• Everything, per month~$24

Measured in September 2026, in New Zealand dollars. The zero is real, not a free trial: the app reads static files from a CDN that does not charge for the bytes it sends, which is the one part of the bill that would otherwise grow with every new user.

What a koha buys

Nothing. No tier, no badge, no supporter-only layer, no ads to remove, no early access. That isn’t modesty — it’s a condition of the thing existing. Braided is built on data that several agencies make open for non-commercial use, and the moment money buys a feature, the app is a commercial product using data it isn’t licensed to use commercially.

So a koha is a koha: it pays a server bill, and it says thanks. If that’s not appealing, using the app and telling someone about it is genuinely worth as much.

The small print, all of it

• It is one payment. Nothing recurs, nothing is stored to charge again, and there is no account to cancel.
• There is no tax credit. Braided is one person in Ōtautahi Christchurch, not a registered charity or an IRD‑approved donee organisation. Stripe’s emailed receipt is the only receipt there is.
• Changed your mind? Email within a month and it comes back in full, no questions asked.
• It can come down. The app’s button points at this page rather than at a payment page, so if the ask ever reads as commercial to an agency whose data Braided depends on, it disappears everywhere at once — including from versions already installed.

Other ways to help, all of them free

• Tell a council. The biggest gaps in this map aren't technical. Otago and the Bay of Plenty measure their rivers with public money and don't publish the results in a form anyone may reuse — which is why the Clutha, the country's largest river by volume, has no reading here. A ratepayer asking for open data carries further than a developer asking.
• Report what's wrong. A gauge reading nonsense, a river named badly, a hut in the wrong place — every one of those is fixable and most are invisible from here.
• Rate it. If it's useful, a review in the App Store or Play Store is how anyone else finds it.

If you'd rather give elsewhere

The organisations doing the actual work in this space need it more: the NZ Mountain Safety Council, Surf Life Saving New Zealand, LandSAR, and your local Coastguard unit. None of them are affiliated with Braided, and all of them will use it better.