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Written plainly, because a reader deciding whether to trust a project is entitled to know how it stays alive and what that money makes it want to do.
We charge for the work we did. We do not charge for access to the heritage. Everything on the revenue side of this page sits outside the corpus text, and the corpus text stays free to individuals permanently.
In order of intended weight. All four are intent rather than record: none of them is generating revenue today.
Grants
The primary intended support, and the honest reason is that this is work with real public value and no natural consumer market. The target programmes fund oral-literature collection, African language technology, and digital scholarship centred on historically marginalised communities. The named programmes are listed at the foot of this page.
Institutional access
The intended recurring revenue. Universities, libraries and cultural institutions are asked to pay for institutional-grade access: durable citation, usage reporting, catalogue records, accessibility compliance, and a continuity commitment. Individuals get the same text free. This is the standard arrangement for scholarly resources and it funds free public access rather than competing with it.
Software licensing
The platform underneath this corpus is not Yorùbá-specific. Other language and heritage communities have the same problem and almost none have the engineering. Licensing that platform is the project's main commercial line, and it sits entirely outside the heritage material.
Teaching, commissioned work and voluntary support
The remainder. None of it involves selling anything devotional, initiatory or ritual.
No grant has been awarded and no institutional agreement is in place. The project is currently self-funded. The programmes named below are targets, not funders of this work, and nothing on this page should be read as a claim of their support.
The list is the point. A reader deciding whether to trust the project is deciding on the refusals.
Paywall the corpus
The heritage text stays free to individuals, permanently, with no account required.
Sell divination or spiritual services
No readings, no initiations, no Odù interpretations, no spiritual services of any kind.
Sell ancestry or lineage reconstruction
The records do not support it, and selling reconstructed heritage to people who badly want it is the most extractive option available.
Put òrìṣà imagery or Odù signatures on merchandise
Sacred iconography is not a product surface.
License Ifá verse content for generative AI training
The foreseeable downstream harm outweighs any revenue, and the decision is not a close one.
Take investment that requires growth the material cannot ethically produce
A funding structure that needs the corpus to scale faster than it can be sourced would break every other commitment on these pages.
This is a small operation and it intends to stay one. It is not venture-funded and is not trying to become large.
Realistic funding supports a very small team doing this carefully over a long period, which is the only shape in which the work is worth doing at all.