Become a sponsor to J P Finley

Hi — I'm JP.

I build software for people the mainstream skips.

That's not a tagline. It's the throughline across everything I work on: tools for ADHD brains and dyslexic readers, infrastructure for healthcare gaps the big platforms don't bother with, frameworks for housing situations the standard tooling treats as edge cases, and a handful of other quieter projects in domains where independent builders are the only ones still trying.

The flagship: Read It Aloud

Read It Aloud is a free, privacy-first browser extension that turns any text on a webpage into clean, natural-sounding audio.

I built it because I have ADHD.

Reading long articles, court filings, and research papers on a screen was a constant uphill battle — the words would blur, my focus would drift, and 20 minutes would vanish on 3 paragraphs of progress. Audio cut through the wall.

The extension is now serving people with dyslexia, ADHD, post-concussion sensitivity, visual fatigue, language learners, and anyone who'd rather listen than read.

It's free and always will be. No ads. No analytics. No data collection — the architecture cannot collect data, by design. That's a structural privacy commitment, not a marketing claim.

Chrome is shipping to the Web Store now. Edge, Brave, Opera, Firefox, and Safari (macOS + iOS) are next.

A bit of background

I'm an independent operator. My engineering background runs from a Commodore 64 in childhood through enterprise rollouts at Boeing and State Farm, senior systems administration for the Illinois General Assembly, time at Apple, and twenty-plus years moving between technology, sales, and advisory work across multiple industries.

I mention this so you know the work has weight behind it. Not so you think I'm a corporate operator with a side hobby — I'm not. I'm an independent builder, shipping serious work on personal time and personal savings, because the projects I want to ship are the ones nobody else is going to.

Why this needs sponsorship

I could have built Read It Aloud as a $5/month SaaS. I didn't. I could have taken VC. I didn't. I could run analytics, sell anonymized data, A/B test dark patterns to lift retention. I refuse to.

Each one of those refusals costs revenue. They're deliberate — built so the tool stays free and private for the people who need it most, who often can't afford another subscription on top of medication, therapy, school costs, or rent.

That model only works if the underlying work gets supported some other way.

That's what sponsorship is for. Independence costs money. Sponsorship is the structure that funds the choice to stay independent.

What your sponsorship funds, concretely

• $99/yr Apple Developer Program — currently the blocker on shipping Safari + iOS versions. Until this is funded, an entire population of iPhone and iPad users with ADHD and dyslexia can't access the extension. This is the highest-leverage dollar in the project right now.
• Microsoft Edge Add-ons + Mozilla AMO listing fees
• ElevenLabs credits for testing new voices and accessibility features
• Time — every hour I spend on the free public work is an hour not earning consulting income. Sponsorship is the bridge that keeps that hour viable.
• Independence from VC and platform capture — sustains a model where users come before metrics, forever.

What sponsors get back

• Recognition in the project's GitHub README sponsors section
• Quarterly insider note on what's shipped, what's coming, and what I'm learning across the broader portfolio (sponsors see things that don't go public yet)
• Direct line for feature requests and roadmap input (Council tier and above)
• The quiet satisfaction of knowing you're funding independent accessibility work that genuinely wouldn't exist otherwise

GitHub Sponsors vs. Buy Me a Coffee

Read It Aloud has its own Buy Me a Coffee — Coffee tips, monthly Supporter, and a $33 Kindred lifetime tier (the 33 is on purpose; ask me sometime). That channel serves people who found the product and want to support the product.

GitHub Sponsors serves something different: people who want to back the independent builder shipping serious work across multiple domains, not just buy a feature in one extension. Sponsorship here is a bet on what gets shipped next — including the work that doesn't have an obvious monetization story and never will.

The bigger picture

The people who need software the most are usually the ones nobody's building for. That's true in accessibility, in healthcare administration, in housing rights, in independent development, and in the long tail of "things that should exist but don't fit anyone's growth model."

I'd rather build them than wait for someone else to.

If that resonates — thank you. Genuinely.

— JP