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Rhododendra will always be free for you to use, but it is not free for me to make. I am on track to pay a thousand dollars a year in software tooling and hosting costs. Development also takes a great deal of work - I have spent many hundreds of hours building it in my spare time, and I continue to actively work on it.

Rhododendra needs your help. Your donations will help fund the site and support my work. Together, let's make Rhododendra the most comprehensive rhododendron database on the net. Thank you for your support!

The year is 2026 and AI is now a major part of a software developer's workflow. I've been able to build so much more, so much faster, than I could when I started this project. But AI ain't cheap, and I have a lot of work to do here. It's where the majority of my current costs are.

Enough preamble, here's what I'm building:

I just released a ton of usability improvements for both Mobile and Desktop. The pages are now way easier to view and interact with on a phone. I've made the images much clearer on both phone and desktop.

But what I'm most excited to share is that I'm almost done building a new contribution system that will bring Rhododendra to life. I've already built much of it, but it's turned-off until all the pieces are all in place.

Of course, this is ridiculously complicated - there are so many moving pieces: database schema version management; image transcoding pipelines; image storage; database backups; audit trail reporting; contributor, moderators, and admin user accounts; data recovery; content delivery networks; security; and on and on and on.

The future is bright, but I need your help. Thanks for being a part of this journey with me!