lowbono

A reusable, pip-installable Django library — the referral engine behind a pro-bono / low-bono / nominal-fee professional-referral portal. It provides users & professionals, referrals, a practice-area taxonomy, income-eligibility screening, an admin-configurable email/notification engine driven by a Joeflow workflow base, an optional LLM categorizer, and a pluggable-profession framework that lets you add your own professional types without touching core.

It is tailor-made for the legal-justice-access domain — not a generic CRM.

Install

pip install lowbono

Optional extras: lowbono[llm] (OpenAI + Presidio categorizer), lowbono[allauth] (Google-OAuth adapter), lowbono[anymail] (email backends).

Quickstart

1. Define a concrete User(BaseUser) and set AUTH_USER_MODEL.
2. Add the engine + its dependencies to INSTALLED_APPS (ordering matters).
3. Register at least one profession plug-in in LOWBONO_PROFESSIONAL_APPS.
4. Include lowbono.urls and lowbono.urls_professions.
5. migrate, then python manage.py lowbono_preflight and lowbono_seed_demo.

See the documentation for the full walkthrough, the settings reference, the profession-plugin guide, and the frozen public-API contract.

Design principles

• Concrete engine, abstract identity — only User/Professional are abstract.
• Explicit contract over convention — professions declare identity via AppConfig attributes, never inferred from app-name strings.
• Settings-driven, registry-based — no hardcoded app labels or URL names.
• Override, don't fork — every template/view/form/admin/string is overridable.

Support matrix

Python 3.11–3.13 · Django 5.0–5.1 · Joeflow 1.4.0. US-centric defaults are all settings-overridable. The taxonomy's content-translation columns are fixed at en/es for 0.1; UI strings are translatable and supplied per project — see Internationalization.

Development

export UV_PROJECT_ENVIRONMENT=~/.venvs/lowbono   # keep venvs outside the repo
uv sync
make ci        # lint-leakage + migration-check + tests + wheel-contents

See CONTRIBUTING.md.

License

AGPL-3.0-only. See docs/license.md and the proprietary-boundary doc for what adopters may keep proprietary.