Anyone can write a mission statement. These five commitments are structurally enforced — written into our LLC operating agreement, our software licenses, and our product architecture. They bind us legally and technically, not just morally.
A photrap link you create today will resolve in 2035, 2045, and beyond. We will never shut down the resolver without a minimum of five years public notice and a complete, documented migration path to export every link you've ever created.
The internet is full of link rot. We are structurally committed to not contributing to it. Every slug, every resolver chain, every photrap — preserved.
The OCR engine that powers our screenshot pipeline is MIT licensed and always will be. We will never change this license, restrict this codebase, or add commercial terms to it. Self-host it, fork it, build on it — no permission needed, no strings attached.
This is our commitment to the developer community that makes tools like this possible. The engine is a gift. It stays that way.
The resolver processes your request and forgets it. We store slugs and resolver chains — not content, not URLs you've visited, not what you've read or watched. We collect an email address only if you choose to give it to us, for the specific purpose of link history. That's it.
No behavioral profiling. No advertising. No selling your data. photrap LLC has no advertising revenue, and we are structurally prohibited from creating any.
photrap is built on open source tools — Lightning Network, Tesseract OCR, jsQR, and others. Every quarter, 1% of photrap API revenue is contributed back to those projects or to open source infrastructure that benefits the commons.
This is automatic, not discretionary. The contribution log is published below and updated quarterly. We don't get to skip a quarter because revenue was low.
Export all your photraps as a JSON file at any time, with no friction and no cost. The export format is open and documented — you can import it into any system that supports it, build your own resolver, or just keep it as a record.
We are not a trap. The name is about what we do to media links — not what we do to you.
photrap stands on the shoulders of open source projects built by people who asked nothing in return. We ask nothing less of ourselves. 1% of API revenue goes back every quarter.
These are not aspirations. They are obligations — written into the legal structure of photrap LLC and the licenses of our software.
The internet works because people built things and shared them. We intend to do the same.