For benefactors
This page exists for people and institutions considering a substantial gift. It is deliberately plain, because the fastest way to waste your time and ours is to describe this as something it isn't.
What this is not
This is not a venture-scale business and it is not trying to become one. The core product is free and MIT licensed, which means there is no access to gate, no lock-in to compound, and no exit that makes anyone's fund whole. If you are evaluating this against a return multiple, the answer is no, and we would rather say so on a public page than three meetings in.
What it is
Civic infrastructure, in the same sense as a bridge or a library: expensive to build, cheap to use, valuable in proportion to how many people can reach it, and unlikely to be built by anyone whose business depends on it staying scarce. Ohio's voter file has been public for decades and effectively unreadable for just as long. The work of making it readable has been done. Funding here keeps it current, keeps it free, and pushes it into counties that have never had it.
What money buys
Time, mostly — the recurring engineering to reprocess eighty-eight counties on each state file drop, the county-by-county data quality work, and the hours spent getting a precinct captain who is not a programmer to the point of running her own briefing. Secondarily: hosting, and eventually a second pair of hands. Nothing here funds customer acquisition, because there are no customers.
How you can check the work
Every claim on this site is verifiable without asking us. The code is public. The data-quality ledger is published, including the errors we found and corrected. The trust page describes what the deployed system can and cannot do, in terms you can confirm by reading it. Diligence here is an afternoon, not a data room.
The honest risk
This is currently one person. That is a real single point of failure and no amount of open licensing fully solves it — though the license does mean the work survives us, which is more than most projects can say. The other open question is structural: a benefit corporation can accept patronage but is generally not eligible for the foundation money that funds work of this kind, and we are actively working out whether that argues for fiscal sponsorship or a companion nonprofit. If you have navigated that, we would value the conversation as much as the gift.