What stays free, and what patrons pay for
The dashboard, the briefings, the walk maps, the source code, and the published account of how to read Ohio's voter file correctly are free, and stay free, to anyone. No account gate, no county-party contract, no "contact sales." That is not a promotional period — it is the entire point of the project, and the model explains why.
What patrons fund is the work behind it: reprocessing eighty-eight counties every time the state drops a new file, keeping the county-deviation ledger current, and the unglamorous hours of sitting with a precinct captain who is not a programmer until she can generate her own briefing. That work is real, recurring, and currently done by one person.
Patron tiers
- Follower — free. Release notes, the schema-findings posts, and the full public repository. You do not need to pay us anything to use or run Precincts.info, ever.
- Precinct — $5/month. Everything above, plus early access to writeups and your name in the project credits. This is the tier for individual captains and activists who want the work to continue.
- Ward — $25/month. Plus the processed data: statewide Parquet and JSON refreshed with each new state file, jurisdictional rollups, and the county-deviation ledger in machine-readable form. Built for analysts, journalists, and other civic-tech projects who want the hard part already done.
- County — $100/month. Plus monthly group office hours — one recorded hour, questions answered in public where possible — and priority on the issue queue. Suited to county parties and community organizations.
- District — $500/month, four seats. Plus one custom county or district analysis per quarter, scoped to a written cap of twelve hours. Capped at four patrons because it is direct labor and honest capacity beats an oversubscribed promise.
No tier buys access to information. Every tier buys capacity to keep producing it.
Other ways to help
Run it in your county and tell us what broke — that is worth more than a subscription. Report a data problem you can see in your own precinct, since local knowledge is the one thing no pipeline produces. If you work at a board of elections and something we've published about your county is wrong, please write; the ledger exists to be corrected.
Larger funding
Foundations, civic-tech funders, and individuals considering a substantial gift should read the benefactors page, which is candid about what this is and isn't as a financial proposition.