Support this project
The scorecard is free for every transit agency, and it will stay that way. It still costs money to host and to keep the data fresh. One small recurring sponsor covers the whole thing.
What it costs to run
The core site is deliberately cheap. Static pages, a daily scoring run, and a read API together cost single-digit dollars a month today. The full footprint this project wants to sustain lands at roughly $75 to $200 a month. Sponsorship at that level pays for:
- Hosting and bandwidth for the site, the read API, and the grade badges agencies embed.
- The daily data refresh: fetching and validating the feeds of about 1,500 agencies across the US and Canada, every day.
- Instant scoring, so anyone can paste a feed URL and see a grade before publishing, at a cost of a cent or two per run.
- A national realtime archive that samples GTFS-Realtime feeds around the clock. This is the largest planned line item and the first thing new sponsorship would unlock.
Every service above runs with a hard spending cap. If a cost line ever threatens to grow past this range, the design changes before the bill does.
What stays free, no matter what
Everything an agency touches: the scorecards, the plain-language fix guidance, the open data and API, the badges, instant scoring, and feed-health alerts. Sponsorship adds capacity. It never moves an existing feature behind a paywall.
If a paid offering ever exists, it will be an addition for the programs that support many agencies at once, such as a saved-portfolio workspace for a state liaison. Nothing is subtracted from the free tier to create it.
What sponsorship does not buy
- No influence over the scores. Grades, methodology, weights, and which agencies are listed are never for sale. The full rubric is public.
- No official status. This is an independent data-quality lens, not a compliance determination or a certification. It states what a feed publishes; it does not certify it.
- No rankings. The scorecard exists to help agencies fix things, not to shame them, and sponsor placement will never be used to frame it otherwise.
Sponsors are disclosed on this page and in the repository, always. Funding that comes with a request to change any of the above is declined.
How to sponsor
Sponsorship accounts are being set up. Until the buttons below go live, the fastest way to start is to get in touch directly:
Start a sponsorship conversation on GitHub
Prefer email? Reach the maintainer through chelseakr.com.
No sponsors yet. The first ones will be listed here, with what their support pays for.