Why it’s free
Because the people who run it were once the people who needed it.
Chingu is volunteer-run. No investors. No sponsors buying your data. No premium tier. No credit card, ever. Here’s how that actually works.
Alumni come back, and they bring friends.
Most Voyage Guides, workshop leaders, and operations volunteers are former members who finished a Voyage and stayed. Every cohort seeds the next. What it costs to run Chingu at this scale is what it costs in server time and volunteer hours — and the hours are given freely by people who already benefited from this exact model.
No asterisks. No tiers. No dark patterns.
- No credit card. Not at application. Not ever.
- No premium tier. Every member has the same access. There is no “Chingu Pro.”
- No upsell. We don’t route you through a free trial to charge you later.
- No sponsored placements. No partner bootcamps buying your email. No affiliate deals.
- No selling data. We don’t sell it, share it, or license it.
- No investors. Nothing to return to shareholders. Nothing to IPO.
It’s a short list.
- A few hundred dollars a month in server and hosting costs
- Free tiers of developer tools (Discord, GitHub, Figma, Notion)
- That’s basically it
Everything else — curriculum, mentorship, facilitation, support, programming — is donated time from volunteers.
“Stuff like this (not just Chingu, but any kind of volunteer or low-bar-of-entry work that gets you building with other humans) is VITAL for building soft skills.”— Emily C., Web Developer and Voyage alum
The trust questions, answered.
- Will Chingu always be free?
- Yes. Staying free is the core commitment. If that ever changed, it would stop being Chingu.
- What’s the catch?
- You show up for your teammates. You run your standups. You ship your product. That’s it — the social contract is the price of admission.
- Why hasn’t a VC or bootcamp company bought Chingu?
- We’re a volunteer-run community, not a company. There’s nothing structurally for sale.
- Can I donate?
- The best thing you can donate is your time — mentor a future cohort, run a workshop, review someone’s code. If you’ve done a Voyage, you’re welcome to come back as a Voyage Guide.
- Why is there no advertising?
- We don’t sell attention. Every member is here to build, not to be monetized.
- How does this scale?
- Slowly and deliberately. Cohort size is limited by how many Voyage Guides we have, and we only add capacity when former members come back to run teams.
That’s the whole model.
If it makes sense to you, join the next cohort. If you have more questions, the team page has the faces behind it.
Join the next Voyage →