Tornevall Networks Tools and Social Media Tools have grown far beyond a small internal toolbox.
What started as practical helper systems for day-to-day work now includes public documentation, RSS workflows, DNS and DNSBL tooling, SocialGPT, ToolGPT/X bot flows, browser automation, Whisper transcription, mail-support flows, vBulletin onboarding, VirtualBox management, and a growing collection of smaller operator tools around moderation, trust, and automation.
That growth is useful, but it is no longer cheap.
The public support page lives on Ko-fi:
Ko-fi payments are now connected to Tools. The public Donate page and the signed-in AI usage and credits page both link to the live payment path.
This documentation explains what the support is for, what already exists today, and how membership payments relate to internal AI prepaid credit.
There is already a substantial working platform behind the support page: public RSS and documentation surfaces, DNS and DNSBL tools, SocialGPT and related moderation helpers, ToolGPT/X bot flows, browser automation, transcription through Whisper, support-mail automation, account/onboarding systems, and a long tail of admin/operator utilities.
Some parts are public, some are permission-gated, and some are internal/admin-facing. They all share the same maintenance, hosting, API and documentation costs.
Tools depends on a mix of ordinary hosting cost and usage-driven cost. OpenAI/API calls, web-search-backed verification, transcription, browser automation, storage, mail handling, monitoring, and security work all add up.
Support helps keep that work moving without forcing the whole project to be limited to what can be paid privately out of pocket.
The long-term direction can be described as Trustpilot for Social Media.
That does not mean a people-rating database and it does not mean surveillance.
The idea is an independent toolkit around social media trust signals: fact-check assistance, moderation support, audit trails, context gathering, verification helpers, and operator tools that make public claims and moderation work easier to inspect and reason about.
Support helps the platform exist and improve. It does not buy unsafe access.
Support does not include admin access, private user data, moderation decisions, unrestricted API usage, raw secrets, DNS provider credentials, private keys, private system prompts, or shell access to production systems. Supporter features still follow the same authorization, safety and availability rules as the rest of Tools.
The current Ko-fi prices stay unchanged while prepaid AI credit is introduced.
Nano Member is the low-threshold way to support hosting, maintenance and documentation. It now also includes a small $2 Tools AI prepaid credit grant for each successfully paid membership period.
Member is steady recurring support and includes $5 of Tools AI prepaid credit for each successfully paid membership period.
Supporter roughly maps to a baseline infrastructure month and includes $10 of Tools AI prepaid credit per successfully paid period.
Tools Backer supports API capacity, documentation, maintenance, browser automation and AI-assisted workflows. It includes $25 of Tools AI prepaid credit per successfully paid period.
Super Member helps carry a noticeable part of the expensive AI, search, transcription and automation side of the platform. It includes $100 of Tools AI prepaid credit per successfully paid period.
Infrastructure Sponsor is the serious sponsorship level for servers, storage, AI/API usage, DNS-related tooling, security work and longer-term platform development. It includes $300 of Tools AI prepaid credit per successfully paid period.
The support-accounting layer keeps the original euro allocation for project budgeting while the actual spendable AI wallet uses fixed USD-valued prepaid credit. This avoids pretending that EUR and USD are equal and avoids silently converting each Ko-fi payment through a changing exchange rate.
| Tier | Monthly price | Internal AI allocation | Project support | AI prepaid grant |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nano Member | EUR 15 | EUR 2 | EUR 13 | $2 |
| Member | EUR 35 | EUR 5 | EUR 30 | $5 |
| Supporter | EUR 75 | EUR 10 | EUR 65 | $10 |
| Tools Backer | EUR 150 | EUR 25 | EUR 125 | $25 |
| Super Member | EUR 500 | EUR 100 | EUR 400 | $100 |
| Infrastructure Sponsor | EUR 2000 | EUR 300 | EUR 1700 | $300 |
The prepaid grant is internal Tools AI credit. It is not direct OpenAI account access, not an API key, not cash and not unlimited usage. Actual OpenAI-backed requests are debited from the wallet using the provider/model pricing rules documented in AI usage, costing and prepaid credit.
Unused prepaid AI credit remains in the user's Tools AI wallet until it is consumed. It is not paid out or transferable between accounts.
Tools exposes a Ko-fi payment webhook at:
POST /api/support/kofi/webhook
The Ko-fi verification token is configured in Support administration and is stored encrypted. Tools verifies it before any payment mutation.
Ko-fi may retry a webhook. Tools uses both Ko-fi message_id and kofi_transaction_id as idempotency identifiers so a retry cannot grant the same membership or AI credit twice.
Ko-fi's webhook setup page also provides four provider tests: a single tip, a first monthly payment, a membership-tier payment and a shop order. Ko-fi reuses sample payment identifiers between those test variants. Tools recognizes that provider fixture narrowly, isolates each variant from real-payment idempotency and labels it as a test. Provider tests never create supporter links, support ledger entries, memberships, AI credit or payment notifications, and repeating the same test remains idempotent.
A verified real payment is linked to a Tools account through an existing supporter link or an exact normalized payment-email match that resolves to one Tools user. Display names are not used as identity. A valid payment that cannot be matched safely is retained for an authorized administrator to assign later. In Support administration, unmatched payments use a server-backed search across the full Tools user set by name, exact email or Tools user ID; a successful manual assignment stores the supporter link so later payments from that Ko-fi email can resolve automatically.
Every newly received verified real Ko-fi payment creates a persisted Tools admin notification through the normal Notifications system, a safe operator notification in #toolsapi, and an email notification to support@tornevall.net. The notifications contain payment/accounting identifiers and result information, not the Ko-fi verification token, payer message or raw webhook payload. Each channel is atomically claimed before delivery so concurrent Ko-fi retries cannot duplicate the alert. Ambiguous delivery failures are reported through Tools operational diagnostics rather than automatically replayed in a way that could duplicate an already delivered notification.
When the payment is matched to a Tools user and settles as either AI-credit-bearing or support-only, that user also gets one persisted Tools notification. The confirmation states the paid amount and currency, whether it was membership/support or a Shop top-up, and the fixed USD-valued AI Credit grant when one was actually added. Support-only payments explicitly state that no AI Credits were added. The notification links back to the user's own /me or /me/ai-usage surface. Unmatched, provider-test, errored and unmapped-tier events do not create a user confirmation. If an unmatched payment is later assigned and settled by an administrator, the user confirmation is created at that point. The user channel uses the same atomic claim model so retries or repeated reconciliation cannot duplicate the confirmation.
A successful Ko-fi membership payment grants the fixed prepaid credit for its tier_name. The membership benefit follows the reported tier; Tools does not infer a higher tier merely because a supporter pays more than the tier minimum.
The internal allocation happens when the verified membership payment is processed. The configured fixed AI Credit grant is added to the user's Tools wallet and the remaining membership value stays in the support/project accounting. This is an internal accounting allocation: Ko-fi does not physically split the provider payment into separate bank transfers.
Ko-fi does not need to send a cancellation event for this model. No new prepaid grant is created unless another successful membership payment webhook is received.
Ordinary Ko-fi tips and donations remain project support. They do not automatically become AI credit.
One-time AI prepaid purchases are handled through explicitly configured Ko-fi Shop products. First create the product in Ko-fi Shop. Ko-fi includes that product's direct_link_code in Shop Order webhook data; Support administration maps that exact code to a fixed internal AI credit value, for example a product that grants exactly $10 of Tools AI credit. The Tools mapping does not create the Ko-fi product and does not derive AI credit from the purchase price.
A useful setup flow is: create the Shop product in Ko-fi, send Ko-fi's Shop Order provider test or make a controlled purchase to confirm the code sent by Ko-fi, then save that exact code and the intended fixed AI-credit amount under Ko-fi Shop AI top-ups in /admin/support. Only active mappings grant AI credit.
Unknown shop items remain ordinary support. This prevents a donation or unrelated shop purchase from being interpreted as AI capacity by accident.
Authorized Support administrators can open an individual support account and see the real Ko-fi payments that were matched to that Tools user, including ordinary support-only donations and membership payments.
Each real payment has a separate external transfer state. Once the corresponding Ko-fi money has actually been paid out or moved to the intended account, an administrator can mark the payment as transferred and record the transfer time, destination/account label, reference and an optional reconciliation note. A payment can also be returned to pending if the marker was set prematurely.
This transfer marker does not allocate funds inside Tools. It does not add or remove AI Credits, replay the Ko-fi webhook, change the payment owner or alter the membership tier. Membership allocation and Shop AI Credit grants remain determined by the verified provider payment and their configured mappings.
The current baseline server cost is roughly in the EUR 70-75/month range before OpenAI usage, web search, transcription, browser automation, and development time are counted.
Nano remains intentionally low-threshold. Member sits around half of the baseline monthly server cost. Supporter lands roughly around one baseline server month. The higher levels help cover the more expensive usage-driven parts of Tools.
The introduction of prepaid AI credit does not require raising the current Ko-fi membership prices. Ko-fi membership price changes would also need separate handling for existing members, so prepaid benefits are being added to the current tier structure instead of changing the membership prices as part of the billing rollout.
Support makes it easier to keep the existing systems stable, document the platform properly, continue building the parts that still need more work, and fund the actual provider usage generated by supporter-facing AI features.
If the project is useful to you, the direct support page is: