Pro bono · non-profits in Bureau, Putnam & Marshall
We are a web and software company in Princeton. For non-profit organizations working in Bureau, Putnam and Marshall Counties, we design, build, host and look after a proper website at no charge for the first 12 months. You own it from the first day. When the year is up you decide what happens next — including taking it somewhere else, with our help.
For non-profits operating in Bureau, Putnam or Marshall County, Illinois.
What happens at month 12
The reason a free website makes some boards nervous is the year after. So here is that year, in advance.
What gets built, what is included, and what the reduced rate would be if you stay. You see the second-year number before we write a line of code.
Hosting, security, backups and changes are handled. You send an email; it gets done. Nothing is invoiced.
We hand over the files, the database and the domain, and we will talk to whoever takes it over. No exit fee, nothing held back, no arguing about who owns what.
Hosting, maintenance and support at $59 a month — the Essential plan, at the price anyone pays, on the same 12-month term everyone signs. The build stays free for good. One difference worth knowing now rather than in month fourteen: during the free year you email us a change and we make it. On Essential that becomes one content change a year included, plus fixes to hours, phone numbers and typos any time, free. Most groups find that is enough. If yours publishes events every month we will tell you so before you decide.
What the year includes
A website made for your organization, not a template with your name dropped into it.
On our own servers, with the certificate handled. Nothing for you to renew.
Daily backups, security patches and monitoring for the whole year.
What you do, who you help, events, how to donate or volunteer, and how to reach a person.
Contact, volunteer sign-up and event enquiries that land in a real inbox.
We connect the giving platform you already use. We do not take a cut of anything.
Your Google Business Profile and the groundwork so people find you by name.
For twelve months, changes and questions come to us. No ticket queue.
Being straight with you
A free offer with fine print underneath it is not a free offer. So here is the fine print, on the same page, in the same size type.
A registrar charges for a domain and we cannot waive someone else's fee. We register it in your organization's name and pass the cost straight through.
If you want a ticketing platform or a donation processor that charges a fee, that fee is theirs and stays yours.
We will lay out and edit what you have, and tell you honestly what is missing. Commissioning a photographer is your call.
Case management, member databases, complex integrations. We will tell you before we start, not after.
Why we do this
Most organizations around here run on volunteers and a budget that was already spoken for. The food pantry, the historical society, the rescue, the fire auxiliary — the work gets done because a handful of people keep doing it, not because anyone is well funded.
Those groups usually cannot justify spending money on a website, and they are right not to. Every dollar has somewhere better to be. So the website ends up being a Facebook page, or something a volunteer built in 2011 and nobody can log into any more.
We do not have money to hand out. We have people who build websites, and some hours that do not have to be billed. That is a thing we can actually give, so we are giving it — and giving it in a way where you keep what you get.
Tombatossals Softworks LLC, operating as Intervolutions Princeton, Illinois
Who it is for
Not on the list? It is a list, not a rule. If your organization does real work in these three counties, write to us.
Where
Bureau County
County seat: Princeton
Princeton · Spring Valley · DePue · Ladd · Tiskilwa · Wyanet · Sheffield · Walnut · Buda · Neponset · and everywhere in between
Putnam County
County seat: Hennepin
Hennepin · Granville · McNabb · Standard · Mark · Magnolia · and everywhere in between
Marshall County
County seat: Lacon
Lacon · Henry · Wenona · Toluca · Sparland · Varna · and everywhere in between
How it works
We handle hosting, domains, certificates, email delivery and updates. What we need from you is what you know: what the organization does and who it is for.
What the organization does, who it serves and what you wish people could find online. A short form is enough.
We check you are a non-profit operating in the three counties and that the work is something we can do well.
What gets built, what it includes, and what the reduced rate would be if you stay after the first year. Before any work starts.
You review it on a private link. We write every technical part so nobody on your board has to.
Live, maintained and supported for twelve months. Then you choose what happens next.
We can only run a few of these at a time, because they sit alongside the work that pays the wages. If we are full when you write, we will tell you that and tell you when we can start — not leave you waiting on a maybe.
FAQ
Especially the ones a treasurer would ask. If yours is not here, put it in the form.
Ask us directlyPaid clients, not pro bono ones — the same five people build both, and a free website is not a lesser website.
Taking this to your board?
Apply
There is no application form to download and no committee. Write a few lines about the work you do, and we will come back to you with what we would build and when we could start.
No special non-profit tier with fewer things in it. Most organisations stay on Essential; the other two are here so you can see what you are not paying for.
paid month by month · 12-month initial term, no year up front See what each plan includes →
Your site does not change, but everything around it does: browsers, the PHP version on the server, the certificate that expires every three months, what Google considers acceptable. A site nobody touches for two years does not blow up. It decays quietly, and you find out the day a customer tells you it will not load.
New holes are published every week in the software half the internet runs on. What protects you is not the wall you paid for once, it is somebody applying the patch on the Tuesday it comes out. Without that, the site stays just as pretty while it stops being safe.
Hours change, new people start, prices go up, you close for a week in July. A wrong phone number on your website is a customer who called, got nothing, and phoned somebody else. You never find out it happened.
When something goes wrong, the difference between a lost afternoon and ten minutes is having a number to call where the person already knows how your site is put together. That is what you are buying: that it is somebody’s job, not a favour.
Non-profits get probed like everyone else, and a site that collects names or takes donations is a target whether it is small or not. This is what sits in front of it, free year or not.
When someone tries to knock a website over, they send millions of requests at once until the server chokes. That traffic gets filtered out on the network, far from your server, and your site never notices.
OVHcloud infrastructure Anti-DDoS: unmetered, no bandwidth billing, with a stated capacity to mitigate attacks up to 1.3 Tbps.
Most bad traffic is not a person. It is programs trying passwords and probing for holes that are already public knowledge. They get cut off before they touch anything.
Server firewall and automatic IP banning after repeated failed attempts (fail2ban). On sites that need it, Cloudflare in front, with its WAF rules and bot filtering.
An unprotected form fills with spam within weeks, and then you stop reading the inbox that had the real customer in it. Ours ships with two filters already on.
An invisible trap field the visitor never sees, plus per-IP submission limits with a daily cap. If a site takes sustained abuse we add Cloudflare Turnstile, which proves there is a person there without a single traffic-light puzzle.
The usual way a website gets hijacked is a file left behind that should not be there. Every new or changed file is scanned the moment it appears.
Multi-engine malware scanning in Plesk (ImunifyAV) over new, modified and uploaded files, with automatic quarantine. Each site isolated from the others on the server.
Sites that get hacked usually fall through a login screen or a plugin nobody updated. A business site like yours is published already built: no public login to guess at, no third-party plugins sitting unpatched. When a project genuinely needs an editor or a shop, we build it on a platform that has one and we apply the patches ourselves, every week, as part of the plan.
HTTPS enforced with HSTS, security headers (nosniff, Referrer-Policy, Permissions-Policy, frame-ancestors) and a per-page hashed Content-Security-Policy, regenerated on every publish.
No system is bulletproof, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. What can be promised is that there is always a yesterday to go back to.
Daily backups kept off the server, with 30 days of history. A backup that has never been restored is not a backup, so we test them.
