Short answers to what people ask most. If something here is not covered, write to web@hildus.com.
Is the foundation a company?
HILDUS develops and distributes software for intellectual communities — see our mission and what the name stands for. It does not sell your audience, because it never has it: the communities run on machines belonging to their hosts.
What does it cost?
Free to read and take part; paid to create. Registering, reading, commenting, arguing in a forum and belonging to someone else's community cost nothing, anywhere on the platform. Creating something of your own — a page, a site, as many domains as you like under one panel — runs on a subscription to the control panel, sold by a regional representative — shopnseo.ru for Shopnseo, qwetru.ru for Qwetru, who publish the figures for their own market. Having a studio build, design or fill the site for you is separate work at a separate, one-off price, the same at any of the partner studios. This site publishes no figures: the foundation is not the level where money happens.
What about the AI — is it included?
AI is part of the control panel: drafting, restructuring, planning, reading statistics. Access to it comes with every tier; the tokens it burns are metered separately. At the smallest tier you buy tokens when you want them — a single page rarely needs an assistant working daily — and from the next tier upward an allowance is included in the subscription, because at that size it does get used. The amounts, like all figures, are published by the regional representatives.
Do you take a share of what a community earns?
No. Advertising on a community server is sold by its host and the revenue stays with the host — this is the single point the whole project is arranged around. The money in the project comes from a level below the foundation: regional representatives sell panel subscriptions, and partner studios charge a one-off fee for installing a site on the customer's own hosting. The foundation earns from neither, and takes nothing from what your community makes.
Who owns the content and the data?
The people who created them. On a Server-tier installation everything lives in a database on the host machine, and it can be exported or moved. On someone else's server, the same applies between you and that host — worth agreeing on before you invest years of writing into a place.
Am I locked in?
The software runs on ordinary open components on an ordinary VPS; nothing depends on the foundation staying online. An installed server keeps working whether or not we do anything further, and the content is yours to take with you.
What is it good at, and what is it not?
It is built for sites made of content and catalogues: personal pages, blogs, books published chapter by chapter, forums, shops, community servers holding many of these at once. It is not a general-purpose application framework, and it will not be the right tool for a bespoke product with unusual logic.
How finished is it?
The platform runs live sites in production today, including this one. It is also actively developed, which means rough edges exist and some parts of the public documentation lag behind the software. We would rather say that than pretend otherwise.
How do I get help?
Write to web@hildus.com. If you need paid work — setup, design, development or content — the partner studios are listed on the platform and live sites.
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