Become a sponsor to Sybre Waaijer

Hi. I'm Sybre Waaijer, and I build The SEO Framework, Troy, and Myrtea (coming soon) from the Netherlands. I work independently: no venture capital, no parent company, no shareholders.

What you are funding

The SEO Framework is a WordPress SEO plugin on over 250,000 sites, including NVIDIA, Kaspersky, the U.S. Social Security Administration, Qualys, Vivaldi, Santos, the Linux Foundation, Ars Technica, and MariaDB.

It writes meta tags, structured data, sitemaps, and robots directives for you. It has no ads in the interface, no branding on your site, and no upsell between you and your work. Over 30,000 hours have gone into making it that quiet. I have personally answered 5,000+ support inquiries, and the plugin is designed so most people never need to send one.

Troy is the independent WordPress sideloader: one upload, your own repository, and no directory that can block, ban, or delete your code.

Myrtea is next. What it does can wait. Building it cannot.

I am one person. TSF and Troy ship unrestricted, on purpose. Myrtea is the branch.

Why sponsor, specifically

Yoast was acquired. Rank Math was acquired. All in One SEO was acquired. Their incentive is revenue growth. Mine is a better product.

The usual WordPress growth loop goes: nag in the admin, upsell the user, buy ads, get featured, get acquired. TSF does none of that. The WordPress plugin directory does not promote independent software that refuses to shout, so discovery here is search, word of mouth, and whatever the algorithm already favors.

Optional extensions have existed since 2017. They keep the lights on. They do not fund branching out.

There is no R&D budget and no second hire. Competitors pay for the next thing from a team budget. I pay for it from what is left once the lights are on, which means it waits. Sponsors are how a one-person shop buys the hours that invoiced extras never quite fund: core TSF, Troy, and Myrtea.

I will not turn the core into a funnel to staff an army. Plugins that treat your dashboard as a billboard fund their teams from the billboard. My software does not. Every fundamental SEO feature ships without a paywall. Extensions are extras (keyword analysis, article schema, monitoring) that pay for the lights. Sponsors pay for going further.

What your money does

• Keeps TSF compatible with WordPress and search engines on every release
• Pays for security research, such as query-attack protection that most SEO plugins do not even look for
• Covers the unglamorous maintenance that 250,000 sites silently depend on
• Keeps Troy a real alternative to a single directory
• Buys the hours that invoiced extras do not: core TSF, Troy, and Myrtea
• Keeps me able to say no to acquisition, and to "unlock this with Pro"

It does not buy you a feature, nor does it buy you a vote on the roadmap. You already received my software as a gift. What you give back is the ability to keep shipping it without becoming the thing it was built to replace.

If you already run my software

You are not subsidizing a stranger's hobby. You are completing an exchange that already happened.

If my software saved you an afternoon, or spared you a dashboard full of upsells, a few dollars a month is a rounding error. If a company depends on it, a three-figure tier costs less than an hour of an SEO consultant's time.

You will not be sponsor number 800. You will be one of a few people funding the work that doesn't invoice. I see who sponsors through GitHub, and I will not make you public unless you ask.

For companies and agencies

GitHub handles billing. At the company tier, I will thank you personally, list you if you'd like the credit, and share my email address. If you have something to discuss, write to me.

I will not put you in a Discord and call it a perk. Access that turns into unpaid support doesn't help anyone.

A short personal note

I got here by accident. I needed SEO that would not spam a multisite network, so I built it. WPMUdev told me to ship it to WordPress.org. That was 2015. I am still here.

The longer version is on the about page.

Thank you to the people already sponsoring. You are not lost in a crowd.

The sponsor button is on this page.