Open Source Apothecary At Home / Build your own box
Support this project
Nothing here is for sale and nothing is paywalled. If it is useful, donations keep it running and keep it independent.
guideThis handbook is free, and it is meant to stay free. There is no shop, no subscription, no paywall, no advertising, no sponsored content, and no affiliate links anywhere on the site. Nothing is sold to you and nothing is recommended for commission.
How it is funded. By donations from people who find it useful. That is the whole model. It is deliberately the least efficient way to fund a publication and the only one that leaves the content unowned — no advertiser has an interest in what the evidence says, and no product can buy a favourable entry.
What donations pay for. Server costs and a domain, if the site is hosted. The evidence harvest runs against free public APIs. The rest of the cost is time.
What donations explicitly do not buy. There is no tier that changes what you can read, no supporter-only content, no early access, and no influence over what the handbook says about any remedy or product. A donor cannot pay to have a remedy upgraded, and cannot pay to have a competitor's remedy downgraded. If that ever changed, the project would have lost the only thing that makes it worth reading.
Why it is open source. The build system, the evidence queries and the harvested data are all published with the handbook, so anyone can re-run the harvest, check a quotation, dispute an entry, or fork the whole thing. The claim on every page is that a specific sentence appears in a specific study — and the machinery that checks that claim is not hidden.
What you can do instead of donating, which may be worth more. Check an entry against the primary source and tell us if it is wrong. Add the herb you know about that is missing. Grow a plant and tell the next person how it went. The handbook is a commons, and a commons improves when people use it and correct it.
On the word "free". Free as in no cost, and free as in libre. Copy it, print it, put it on a USB stick for someone with no internet, teach from it, translate it, fork it. The licence is on the open data page.
Growing it
Why the growing section is the proof of the model
A subscription box can only send you dried herbs — a perishable, shippable, mark-up-able commodity. It cannot send you a plant, and it cannot send you the knowledge to grow one, because that would end the subscription.
This handbook gives away the growing instructions for every plant in the curriculum. That is the structural difference between a commons and a product, and it is why the growing section exists at all rather than a list of things to buy.
Preparation
Ways to support the project
- Donate if you are able — the link is on the site. Any amount, no tier, no reward, no influence.
- Correct an error. If an entry misstates a study, say so. Corrections are more valuable than money here.
- Contribute a herb or a growing note from your own ground and climate.
- Copy and redistribute. Put it on a USB stick, print the pages you need, hand it to someone who needs it.
- Don't buy anything from us — there is nothing to buy.
What is never accepted
- Payment for a favourable entry
- Sponsored content presented as content
- Affiliate links
- Advertising of any kind
- Donations with conditions attached to what the handbook says
Cautions and interactions
- No donation buys influence over content. If that changes, the project has failed.
- Be sceptical of any health site that both reviews remedies and sells them. The conflict is structural, and it is this project's reason for existing.
- A site that is free and sells nothing still needs a bias check — read the method and check a quotation yourself.
When this is not a self-care problem — get help
- A health information site with a shop attached — read the reviews with the conflict in mind.