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Support open firmware
Reaper is free.
The routers are not.
AM-Reaper is developed in the open and given away - no licence, no paid tier, no telemetry selling your network back to you. What it does cost is hardware: every supported model has to be bought, flashed, bricked, and recovered on a real bench before a release ships. If Reaper saved you time or made your network make sense, you can help cover that.
Donate via PayPal
Prefer PayPal, or already have a balance sitting there? This goes to the same place and works in most countries without setting anything up.
Donate via PayPalpaypal.me/TheUnboundDeveloper
Sponsor on GitHub
Set up an ongoing monthly contribution through GitHub Sponsors to help keep Reaper hardware and development infrastructure running.
Sponsor on GitHubgithub.com/sponsors/TheUnboundDeveloper
01 / Where it goes
Firmware work runs
on real hardware.
You cannot develop router firmware in an emulator. Every supported model needs a physical unit on the bench, because the only way to know a build is safe is to flash it, break it, and recover it on the actual silicon.
Line item
Approx. cost
RT-BE86USupported target - needs its own unit to validate
$$
RT-BE88USupported target - 10G-capable platform variant
$$
RT-BE96UPrimary development & physical-validation hardware
$$$
GT-BE98Quad-band flagship - separate build target
$$$
GT-BE98 ProTop-end flagship - the most expensive unit to brick
$$$$
RT-BE92UExperimental BCM6765 sibling - newest bench addition, prerelease only
$$
Recovery & bring-up gearSerial adapters, JTAG, spare PSUs, switches,
cabling
$$
Build & CI infrastructureBuild machine, storage, public CI minutes,
artefact hosting
Ongoing
Every dollar goes back into the benchHardware, recovery tooling, and keeping
builds reproducible
100%
02 / Being straight with you
What a donation does
- and does not - buy.
Money should never quietly change how a security project makes decisions. So here is the line, stated plainly, before you give anything.
What your support does
- Buys and replaces physical router hardware for supported models
- Funds recovery gear so a bricked unit is a delay, not a dead project
- Keeps the public build pipeline and artefact hosting running
- Buys development time that would otherwise go elsewhere
- Makes it viable to support models the developer does not personally use
What it explicitly does not
- Buy priority support, an SLA, or any guaranteed response time
- Guarantee a feature, a fix, or support for a specific model
- Influence a security decision, a default, or a disclosure timeline
- Create a commercial relationship, warranty, or licence of any kind
- Count as a tax-deductible charitable contribution - see below
03 / Not everything costs money
Other ways to help.
Some of the most valuable contributions to Reaper have not been financial. If donating is not for you, any of these genuinely moves the project forward.
Report what breaks
A precise bug report against a specific model and release is worth more than a guess at a fix. Open an issue ↗
Test on your model
Only one model is the primary development unit. Real-world confirmation on the other four is the single hardest thing to get.
Improve the docs
Installation notes, recovery steps, and model-specific quirks written by people who just went through them are the most useful docs there are.
Tell someone
Reaper has no marketing budget. If it helped you, mentioning it where BE-series owners actually gather does more than any ad would.
The legal and tax part, in plain language
Donations are made to Unbounded Engineering LLC, a for-profit limited liability company registered in Florida, USA. It is not a registered charity or a 501(c)(3) non-profit, so contributions are not tax-deductible as charitable donations. If you plan to claim a business expense, talk to your own accountant first.
A donation is a voluntary gift, not a purchase. It buys no product, no licence, no warranty, and no support entitlement. AM-Reaper remains provided as-is under the terms of its repository, and flashing third-party firmware always carries risk that is yours to accept.
Payments are processed by Stripe and PayPal. Unbounded Engineering never receives or stores your card number. Because these are one-way gifts rather than sales, donations are generally non-refundable - but if something has gone wrong, email contact@unbounded-engineering.com and it will be sorted out.
AM-Reaper is an independent third-party project. It is not developed, reviewed, approved, sponsored, or endorsed by ASUS or by the Asuswrt-Merlin developer, and donations here support Reaper only - they do not go to either upstream project. If you value the foundation Reaper is built on, please consider supporting Asuswrt-Merlin directly as well.
Ready to chip in?
Any amount helps, and there is no minimum. Thank you for keeping independent firmware viable.