Blog · September 2026 · 4 min read

Why 25% of FreeCoder's earnings go to charity

A quarter of everything FreeCoder ever earns goes to charities that teach and encourage children in India. Not profits — earnings. Before costs, before anything else. This post explains why, which organisations, and — honestly — what that promise is worth today.

Where this comes from

FreeCoder exists because of a payment page.

In 2024 I was a school student who wanted to build software with AI. Every tool that could actually do the work wanted a monthly subscription in dollars. The free ones either couldn't do much, or stopped me a few messages in. I had two options: pay, or give up. I couldn't pay.

So the whole product is built around removing that one barrier. No account, no card, no token caps. If you have a computer and an idea, you can start.

But the barrier starts earlier than that

Here's the thing I kept running into. Removing the payment page helps the student who already has a computer, already reads English comfortably, already knows that "building an app" is a thing a person like them is allowed to do.

For a lot of children in India, the barrier lands years before that. It's a school without a science lab. It's never meeting anyone who built something. It's not knowing the option exists.

A free coding tool does nothing for that child. Someone has to get there first.

The organisations

The 25% goes to organisations working on exactly that — putting learning, tools and encouragement in front of children who would not otherwise get any of it:

• Pratham — one of India's largest education non-profits, focused on children who are in school but not actually learning. Their approach is unglamorous and it works: find out what a child can actually do, then teach at that level.
• Agastya International Foundation — hands-on science for children in rural India, largely through mobile labs that drive to villages. The point isn't the experiment. It's the moment a child realises they're allowed to be curious.
• Wadhwani Foundation — entrepreneurship and skills programmes, aimed at people who want to build something and have no map for how.

Education, curiosity, and then the confidence to build. That's the same ladder FreeCoder sits at the top of. We're funding the rungs below us.

What this is worth today: nothing

I want to be straight about this, because a commitment that sounds impressive and means nothing is worse than no commitment at all.

FreeCoder is free. It currently earns almost nothing, and 25% of almost nothing is almost nothing. Right now this is a promise about the future, not a cheque anybody has cashed.

What makes it real is that the number is fixed before the money exists. It's easy to be generous with revenue you already have and have already made plans for. It's harder to give away a quarter of it in advance, in public, when you don't yet know what it will be. That's the point of saying it now.

The rule is 25% of earnings, not 25% of profit. Profit is a number you can talk your way out of.

Why this isn't marketing

A fair question: is this just a nice line for a landing page?

The honest answer is that it would be a poor one. FreeCoder's actual pitch is simple — it's a capable AI coding agent that costs nothing. That sells itself to anyone who has ever hit a paywall mid-project. Nobody installs a developer tool because of its charitable giving.

This is here because the project only exists due to a barrier I couldn't get past, and it would be strange to build the whole thing around removing that barrier for other people and then ignore the bigger one sitting underneath it.

What happens next

As FreeCoder starts earning, the giving starts with it — and it gets reported here, with numbers, so the claim can be checked rather than believed.

If you want to help right now, the most useful thing isn't money. It's telling a student who thinks they can't afford to start that they can.

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