Dear PortableApps.com User,

Today, I am going to ask you to support PortableApps.com with a donation. Why, you might ask, would a popular software platform like ours need donations?

PortableApps.com is a software platform that is built differently from most software. It's built to be open, letting you use our portable apps with any other software you like and letting you use any portable software you like with our platform. Our platform and tools are 100% open source software, meaning that the code is available for you and everyone else to examine, enhance and use in other software projects.

At our core, we're a group of volunteers all over the world, over 200 in all, with another 220,000 other members of our community helping to organize, assist other users, and suggest the best apps to add to our collection. Over the past 16 years, we've grown from the very first 'portable app', Firefox Portable, hosted on my personal website, to over 400 real apps (and over 300 more in testing) used by millions of users in 56 languages in nearly every country around the world. More than 900 million apps have been downloaded, all free, double-checked to be free of viruses and malware, automatically updated and 100% legal. Nearly 2 million people visit our website every month to download apps, learn about the benefits of portable software and join our growing community.

But PortableApps.com is more than just a software platform and a format. Our goal is to help change the world with software. Software that's not tied to a single computer. Software that can live locally, on a portable drive, on a mobile phone's memory card or in the cloud. Software that's not tied to a locked-down app store that only works with certain hardware or software. Software that can be written by anyone and used by everyone. All delivered transparently, using open technologies, in a secure and stable environment.

Your donation helps us in several ways. Most importantly, it will help us to pay for the increasing costs of bandwidth for software downloads as well as hosting our website, community forums and app store database as well as paying off the personal loans used to enable us to offer many of those downloads. Donations will also help us improve the PortableApps.com platform, updater, app store and community website as well as upgrade our site to support multiple languages and new features.

PortableApps.com is different. It's one of the largest software projects in the world and it's maintained by volunteers. We want to keep PortableApps.com free and growing, but we need the support of thousands of people like you.

I ask you to join us and donate today, to help keep PortableApps.com free. Together, we're just getting started...

Note that donations are made to our operating organization, Rare Ideas, LLC

Thank you,

John T. Haller

Founder and Lead Developer

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) about contributing

Physical checks and money orders made out to 'Rare Ideas, LLC' may also be sent via mail to:

PortableApps.com c/o Rare Ideas, LLC

106 West 32nd St, 2nd Floor

New York, NY 10001