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How your Grampshub subscription supports Gramps Web

I began working on Gramps Web because I wanted a way to preserve my family history and share the research with relatives online. As the project grew with the help of the Gramps community, it became clear that running a server was an obstacle for many people who wanted to use it. That led me to start Grampshub in 2023: a way to get started easily, without having to manage the technical setup, while keeping control of your data and the freedom to move elsewhere.

I also hoped that subscriptions could help support the continued development of Gramps Web. That has become an increasingly important part of Grampshub: your subscription helps fund work and resources that benefit everyone using the open-source project.

Finding and fixing errors

Grampshub’s automatic error reporting surfaces server errors almost immediately, so we can investigate their causes and contribute fixes to Gramps Web. This includes fixing bugs and handling unexpected input with a useful explanation instead of a server error.

These reports contain no personally identifiable information and are not linked to a user or family tree. Customers’ family trees are never inspected to improve the software.

In August, version 3.21 of Gramps Web API, the server component of Gramps Web, addressed errors surfaced by the new reporting, including invalid files and AI assistant failures. Version 3.21.1 followed with better handling of failed reports and invalid dates. September’s version 3.22.1 added checks for interrupted uploads and clearer errors for invalid filters, and fixed requests that could tie up the server while updating the search index.

October’s version 3.24 prevents conflicting operations such as two imports from running at once, and makes exports consistent even while editing continues. All of these changes are in the public releases, so people hosting Gramps Web themselves benefit too.

Paying for development and shared resources

Grampshub is run alongside other work, which helps keep subscriptions affordable while contributing to the costs of developing Gramps Web. Those costs increasingly include AI subscriptions: agents have accelerated the development of new features and help with investigating bugs and reviewing code contributions, but their recurring fees have also made open-source development more expensive. Grampshub helps cover these expenses for work on Gramps Web.

Grampshub also funds the public demo server and the documentation domain, so people can try Gramps Web and learn how to use it before deciding whether to subscribe or run their own server.

Improving Gramps Web through customer feedback

Grampshub customers often have different questions and expectations from people who run their own servers. When customers choose to share feedback, it helps us understand where a workflow is confusing, an explanation is missing, or a change would make everyday research easier.

Keeping many trees running reliably

Grampshub runs many independent family trees in a shared deployment, where performance, background tasks, and upgrades all need to work reliably as the number of trees grows. Fixes for bottlenecks and failures in this deployment go into Gramps Web, helping other administrators run reliable multi-tree installations too.

Multi-tree support was developed for Grampshub and has always been open source, although configuring it has mostly been a task for experienced administrators. Single-tree operation remains the default today, but multi-tree mode is planned to become the default in a forthcoming major release.

Gramps Web owes a great deal to the wider Gramps community, from decades of development and translations to shared knowledge and people helping each other. Your subscription contributes to this work, and the improvements remain available to everyone, including people who will never be Grampshub customers.

Thank you for supporting Gramps Web through your subscription.