Our story
The whole world of the text. Free.
Wellspring is a free place to study the Bible in its whole world — the languages it was written in, the places it names, the peoples it speaks about, the texts around it — and to turn that study into teaching.
- 28Bibles and ancient versions
- 33full-text works
- 5,941topics indexed
- 18African-language Bibles
What it is
Wellspring is a research tool. Everything in it is free, and every source in it is named.
Read
Open a chapter and read it beside every other edition that holds it — up to twenty-three — Hebrew, Greek, Coptic, and Bibles in fourteen African languages.
Research
Follow a word into its concordance. Open a Passage Guide and see everything Wellspring holds about those verses on one page.
Places and peoples
Walk the atlas of every place Scripture names, and read the dossiers on the peoples whose history touches the text.
Concepts
Explore thousands of concepts computed from public-domain indexes, each named in several languages.
The library
The canon and the Apocrypha, 1 Enoch and the Kebra Nagast, the Book of the Dead and the Qurʾan, African oral traditions in full, Philo, the church fathers, the great dictionaries and commentaries — each with its source and its rights on record.
Prepare
When you are ready to teach, the Sermon Builder walks you through preparing a sermon and leaves every word to you.
Why it exists
Free, and free to keep
Every text, commentary, dictionary and lexicon here is public-domain or openly licensed, and every one is named with its edition and its rights. There is no package to buy and no tier to reach.
The whole world of the text
The Ethiopian canon in Ge’ez and the Coptic witnesses, Bibles in fourteen African languages, the places Scripture names and the peoples whose histories touch it — held here in full, and read beside the Hebrew, the Greek and the English.
It is free because of how it is built, not because someone is subsidising it: openly licensed texts, static files, and computation that happens on your own device. There is no server doing work that someone would have to pay for, which is why it can stay this way. The free account is there so your work follows you between devices and stays yours on a shared computer. Nothing behind it costs money.
How it came to be
Wellspring was built by a product designer who spent thirty years keeping ministry at arm’s length before he finally answered it. He came to study the way most people do — outside the seminary, taught by an elder and then by his own reading — and he built the tool for everyone who studies that way. Nothing in it asks you to take his word for anything: every claim shows its source, and the rules below hold for him as much as for anyone.
He kept hitting the same two walls: the research libraries he wanted were out of his budget, and the sources beyond the Western frame were not there to be found. So he built the tool he needed, then decided it should offer everything the well-known platforms offer, to anyone with a question, for nothing.
What we hold ourselves to
- Evidence is not interpretation.
- Every claim shows its evidence. Every interpretation names its framework. A person decides what stands — software never does.
- No tradition is the frame.
- Not any church’s, not the founder’s. Every text is a real edition, labelled for what it is, with its source and rights on record. Holding a text is not endorsing it, and a parallel is only a parallel.
- Your words stay yours.
- Wellspring finds, connects and checks. It never writes your notes or your sermon.
- Free means free.
- No subscription, no premium tier, no ads, no analytics, nothing about you for sale.
- Accessible, or it’s a bug.
- Every screen is checked for barriers before it ships; a barrier is treated as a defect, not a preference.
Who runs it
Wellspring is built and run by U3 Labs, LLC, a small product studio in Florida. The plan is for it to become an independent nonprofit foundation, so that its freedom belongs to an institution and not to one person’s good intentions. Write to hello@wellspringstudy.org — a person reads every message.
What it is not
Not a chatbot with a Bible skin. Not church management software. Not any assembly’s doctrinal engine. Not a Western database with an African shelf added on, and not an African database that leaves the rest out. Nothing in it is presented as true because the builder believes it.