Free to read, and paid for by people who choose to.
Scrollwork has no subscription, no advertising, no tier and nothing in it held back. That is not a launch offer — it is the point. This page exists to ask you to pay for it anyway, and to show you exactly what it costs so the asking is honest.
Who is asking
I am a follower of Jesus Christ. A Christian.
The motivation for this work came through faith. It was a nudge — the Holy Spirit leading me toward something I could actually do. I build software; that is the talent I was given, and this is a way to use it to further the Kingdom of God and to share the good news.
What I wanted was a new way to read the Bible. To study it — the stories, the whole line running through them, the works of Jesus Christ — and to see it laid out at once rather than met a page at a time. That is what I am building, and why the honesty elsewhere on this site matters to me more than the polish: a thing made for that purpose has no business overstating what it knows.
Marshall Guillory
Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.
And the peace of God, which surpasses all comprehension, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.
Scripture quotation taken from the New American Standard Bible®, Copyright © 1960, 1971, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission.
Why it is free
The moment reading costs money, the product changes. It has to keep proving its worth, and the pressure lands exactly where it does most damage: on the content. A canvas of Biblical history that needs to justify a subscription is a canvas with a reason to overstate what the evidence shows, to fill an empty pillar rather than leave it honestly empty, and to sound more certain than the record allows.
Scrollwork says we do not know wherever that is the truth. It can afford to because nobody is paying for certainty.
What the money is for
Running this costs real but small money. Here is the whole of it.
| What | A year |
|---|---|
| The domain, scrollwork.appRenewed annually. | $9.99 |
| Cloudflare Workers PaidServing the site and running the application. Not because of traffic — the free tier covers a hundred thousand readers a day. It is a password: hashing one properly does not fit inside the free plan's ten milliseconds of processor time, and the alternative was dropping the only way in that does not require an account with Google, Apple or Microsoft. | $60.00 |
| Model subscriptions, Scrollwork's shareUsed to draft research, resolve citations against external authorities, and check the corpus at a scale one person cannot read through by hand. No model runs when you load a page — everything is generated and checked in advance, then shipped as static text. Not bought for Scrollwork alone: the subscriptions are shared across three projects and this is its third, which is also the conservative count, since the other two are quiet at the moment and the real usage is higher than a third. | $600.00 |
| Apple Developer Program, Scrollwork's shareNeeded to offer Sign in with Apple and, in time, an iPhone app. The membership is $99 a year plus tax, shared with one other project that uses it, so this is half. | $53.76 |
| Mail, storage, the databaseInside free allowances at this size, and the architecture is arranged to keep them there. | nothing |
| A year of it | $723.75 |
That total is what the three-year reserve below is three years of: $2,171.25. It is a yearly figure rather than a list of bills, and it is generated from the same file the balance is, so the two cannot drift apart.
What happens if there is more than that
Anything given beyond what keeps this running for the next three calendar years is given away again — to a Christian charity of my choosing, or to my church's mission fund.
Not held back, not quietly carried forward against some larger plan I have not told you about. Three years of the costs above is the whole reserve this project needs; past that, the money does more good somewhere else, and keeping it would make this page an appeal for something other than what it says.
The threshold is deliberately a number rather than a sentiment, so it can be checked. Here it is, and every transaction behind it.
Out of pocket −$723.75 · $0.00 given, $723.75 of costs committed
Every cost below has been paid by Marshall Guillory personally. That is the state of it, and it is shown rather than rounded up to nothing.
Everything given, and what it has cost
Costs are counted a year at a time from the day each one started, not reconstructed bill by bill — $723.75 committed so far. Nobody types a line into this file each month: each cost is written once with what a year of it costs, and the site works the rest out when it rebuilds, which it does daily.
Nothing has been given yet.
No donor is named here unless they asked to be, and then by the name they chose rather than the one on their card. Giving is private by default — silence means private, and there is no setting to get wrong.
A name and an email address are recorded when you give, and kept: a gift has to be matched against the platform to confirm it arrived, and money received has to be accounted for. That record is never published and never shared.
Everything this page can honestly show is on it: what the year costs, every gift as it arrives, and the balance the two produce. The figures are kept in a file rather than a database, so a change to them is a dated edit with an author rather than a silent update — but that is a discipline on the person keeping it, not a second thing for you to read. A published commit log would not tell you anything the numbers above do not.
What the money is not for
My own time. Not one hour of the work that goes into this is paid, and none of it ever will be from donations.
This is a passion project. The sourcing, the checking, the writing, the design and the code are given, not billed. A donation covers the bill from somebody else — a server, a registrar, a subscription — and nothing else. If that changes, this page changes first.
Give
Once
Through PayPal. No account needed here, and none there beyond whatever you already use to pay for things.
Every month
Through GitHub Sponsors, which handles recurring giving properly and takes no fee at all — ten dollars arrives as ten dollars.
It does ask you to have a GitHub account, which most readers reasonably do not. If that is you, once is perfectly good.
A gift here is not tax-deductible. Scrollwork is one person, not a registered charity, and I am not a tax-exempt organisation — so nothing you give can be claimed on a return. If a deduction matters to you, give to a registered charity instead; that is a better use of your money than a deduction you cannot take, and it is closer to what I do with anything past three years of costs anyway.
Each amount opens the payment page with that figure already filled in; nothing is charged until you confirm it there. Scrollwork never sees your card or your bank details; those go to the platform and never reach this site. What is kept when you give — a name, an email, the amount — is listed on the privacy page.
What a donation buys
Nothing. There is no supporter tier, no early access, no badge, no advertising to remove, and no feature behind it. A reader who gives nothing and a reader who gives a hundred dollars get an identical product, for ever.
- No subscription to Scrollwork, now or later.
- No content held back from anyone.
- No advertising, and nothing sold or shared — not your name, not your email, not anything.
- No influence over what the canvas says. Sources decide that.
One thing is planned that will cost money, and it is said here before it exists rather than after. A separate companion for running Bible studies by Henrichsen's method will carry a small monthly subscription; one or two of its studies will be free. It is its own product. Nothing already in Scrollwork moves into it, and Scrollwork will mention it where it is relevant and never push it at you.
That last one matters more than the others. The whole claim this product makes is that it shows contested ground as contested and says plainly when the record is silent. A donation that bought a say in any of it would make the claim untrue.
Not able to give? That is genuinely fine, and the product does not know the difference. Telling one other person it exists is worth more than most donations. Write to me if something on the canvas looks wrong — corrections are the most valuable thing anyone sends.