An open work ledger
Open work;
payable.
You did the work. Post the hours. Let the people who benefit decide what it was worth.
Somebody is keeping the thing you use running.
The server, the bot, the co-op's books, the box in the basement that holds everyone's photos. One person pays for it and does the work to keep it going.
Nobody sees that work. You notice the server when it's down, never when someone lost a Sunday keeping it up.
- 01Eat the costQuietly, until it turns into resentment.
- 02Ask people for moneyWhich feels like begging, so it mostly doesn't happen.
- 03Turn it offOne month it's just gone, and everyone is surprised.
Report the work instead of asking for help.
You post what you actually did, in hours. Four hours fixing the database after the upgrade broke it. Two hours replacing the failing drive. Forty dollars for this month's hosting.
Then you share one link with the people who use it. They pick the parts they want to pay for and decide what an hour of that was worth to them.
You say what you're asking an hour. They can go over it, and they can go under it. There's no maximum. The person who'd be wrecked if it disappeared can pay a lot. Someone who barely uses it can pay a little. No payer sees what any other payer chose.
Report the hours
Break the work into pieces someone can actually read. A label, what you did, how long it took.
Say what you're asking and share the link
Your asking rate arrives already filled in on their side — an honest starting number, not a limit. They can change it. You send one link. Nobody needs an account to open it.
They choose, and choose again
Each person picks the hours they want to support and sets their own rate. More than one person can support the same hours. The page stays open.
These are commitments, not features. If a future version of Meritmark breaks one of them, it is the wrong version.
Nothing closes
There is no paid-in-full. Archiving only takes a ledger off your index — the link keeps working, and stays payable, until you void it.
Nobody owes
No balance, no target, no progress bar, no reminder that goes out in your name.
You ask, they decide
You never name a price for a specific person, and you never chase one.
The work is visible before the money is
No one is asked to pay for something they cannot read first.
Payers don't see each other
Anyone holding the link sees totals together, never what one person chose. The person who did the work sees who paid what — that part is deliberate.
We record, we don't vouch
The ledger is a faithful record of what was reported and what was paid. It is not a claim that we watched you work.
quantum meruit — “as much as he has deserved”
Courts have had a name for this for about three hundred years. Where work was performed and no price was ever agreed, a court can award the reasonable value of it.
That names the situation this page is built for. It is not a claim anyone can bring here: nothing on this page is owed, and nothing about it is enforced. You mark what was done. The people who benefit decide what it was worth.
Work performed. No fixed price. Value decided afterward, on the merits. We didn't invent the idea. We built the page for it.
This is the wrong tool if…
- One person owes you one specific amount and you need them to settle it.
- You need reminders, statements, aging, or a way to mark something paid.
- You're raising toward a target and want people to see how close you are.
- The people who benefit from your work are the people least able to pay for it.
Those are real needs. They're just not what this does, and pretending otherwise would waste your afternoon.