IMPACT · PRO BONO
Pro bono builds for activists, healers, and organizers.
The Impact division builds websites, apps and tools for activists, healers, and organizers at no cost, when the work is unpaid, sliding-scale, or serves people who can’t pay. Vegan and animal-liberation projects score highest on the rubric.
What gets built
- Web tools and mobile apps for activists, healers, and organizers doing unpaid or sliding-scale work.
- Built the same way paid work is built: a written spec, work branches, an automated review gate.
- Handed off with the repository and the spec, the same handoff a paying client gets.
Who this is for
Eligible work is unpaid, sliding-scale, or serves people who can’t pay: community clinics, peer-support and harm-reduction groups, care collectives, grassroots campaigns, and organizers.
A practitioner’s or organisation’s own commercial marketing site or booking system is Client-division work, at a rate. See Services.
What does not get built
- Anything that promotes or launders animal exploitation, including welfare-washing and "humane" animal agriculture
- Party-political campaigning or electioneering
- Religious proselytizing
- Anything requiring the studio to act as a legal, medical, or veterinary adviser
- Infrastructure whose purpose is unlawful activity
- Anything the studio cannot build without collecting identifying data on people who would be endangered by its disclosure
- A practitioner's or organisation's own commercial marketing site or booking system: that is Client-division work, at a rate
- Anything that makes or implies medical, therapeutic, or health-outcome claims
- Anything that needs health information stored in a system the studio operates: the group holds that data in a system it controls
Status and capacity
Applications are open.
Applications are reviewed as they arrive. A build starts when a lane is free.
Every applicant hears back within 10 business days.
RUBRIC v1.1 · EFFECTIVE 2026-09-04
Rubric
The rubric
Every criterion, its weight, and what a high score looks like. Compute your own score before you apply.
Cause fit
30%A 5: An animal-liberation or vegan-advocacy campaign; a harm-reduction or justice group serving people who cannot pay; or a care collective doing healing work for a community with no budget for it. The tool's users are the people doing that work.
A 0–1: The applicant's own description names no cause the program serves, or the work is paid or commercial and serves people who can pay for it. Nothing about the project points to unpaid, sliding-scale, or otherwise unfunded impact work.
Cause fit score bands 5 Animal liberation or vegan advocacy is the project's primary purpose 4 Another harm-reduction or justice cause, or healing and care work serving a community that cannot pay for it 2 General good-cause work with no clear beneficiary and no harm reduced 0 Outside the program (see exclusions), declined without a score Leverage
20%A 5: The build removes a bottleneck that measurably caps the group's current output: something they do by hand, badly, or not at all
A 0–1: The build would be a convenience, not a bottleneck removal. Nothing about the group's current output is capped by the problem the build addresses.
Buildability in lanes
15%A 5: Scope fits a written spec and a handful of lanes: no bespoke hardware, no regulated data, no ongoing paid infrastructure the group cannot carry
A 0–1: Scope needs bespoke hardware, handles data the group could not legally or safely hold, or depends on paid infrastructure the group has no way to keep running.
Publishability
10%A 5: The applicant gives consent in principle to a written-up case study and the code can be public
A 0–1: The applicant withholds publishing consent, or the work cannot be described publicly without exposing people the disclosure would endanger.
No adequate alternative
15%A 5: Nothing off the shelf does this, or the group cannot afford or cannot trust the thing that does
A 0–1: An existing tool already does this job well enough, and the group could adopt it today without waiting on a build.
Maintenance reality
10%A 5: A named person on the applicant's side owns the thing after handoff
A 0–1: No one on the applicant's side is named to own the thing after handoff, so upkeep would fall to nobody in particular.
Eligible at 65 or above.
score = Σ (awarded / scoredOutOf) × weight, rounded, out of 100. Computed by a person, not by this site.
How review works
- The application arrives as one email. No queue, no database, no public list of applicants.
- An application matching an exclusion is declined without a score.
- Ben scores each criterion by hand and applies the published weights. No model scores an application.
- At or above the threshold, a project is eligible, not accepted. Eligible projects are taken in score order as lanes free up; an eligible applicant not yet started is told that, and that the queue runs by score, not by when they applied.
- Every applicant hears back within the published turnaround, including a no, with the score and the criterion that cost the most.
- An accepted project runs as a lane: the same written spec, work branches, and review gate as paid work.
- It becomes a case study only after the studio verifies it against the shipping repository and gets a separate, after-the-fact confirmation to publish.
What you send is used to review the application and reply, and nothing else. No newsletter, no list, no third-party analytics on this page.
Not ready to apply? Write an ordinary message instead.