How DocketDrift is funded
Built and maintained by one person. No foundation, no grant, no company. Just a human and a hosting bill.
Where the money goes
- $30–$100 per state, one-time: embedding the full corpus through Voyage AI’s legal model. Minnesota’s ~69,000 opinions ran to roughly 230 million tokens of legal text (about $28); a large state runs toward $100. The embeddings are what make semantic search work — not just "find this exact phrase," but "find opinions about this concept even when they use different words."
- ~$15 per month, ongoing: hosting at NearlyFreeSpeech.NET. Cheap, ad-free, the kind of host that lets a one-person operation breathe.
- Per-query API costs, ongoing: each fresh semantic search costs a tiny fraction of a cent. Honestly negligible at today’s traffic — listed because "where the money goes" should be complete, not because it’s a burden.
- Time: evenings and weekends, building scrapers, parsers, refactors, and editorial review — one state, one judge dossier, one tag at a time.
The next state is Louisiana
Roughly 180,000 appellate opinions — more than the three live states combined — including six years of Louisiana Supreme Court decisions currently missing from every free legal database (its feed into the big public archives broke in 2020 and never recovered; we found the hole, and we know how to fill it). The funding goal is $250, itemized: ~$100 of embedding for semantic search, and the first year of added hosting and storage for a corpus that roughly doubles this site. The scraping, parsing, and editorial review are the maintainer’s own labor, free.
Any amount helps — the bill is the same whether one person funds it or fifty. The live progress bar is on the donation page.
Other ways to help
- Request your state. Demand drives the priority queue.
- Tell a journalist, a law student, a paralegal, or anyone who’d find appellate decisions easier to follow with this site.
- Spot something wrong? Use the report form (also the “Report an error” link in the nav on any page), or email hello@docketdrift.com. Quiet correction is the most valuable contribution.
DocketDrift will stay ad-free, tracker-free (one GoatCounter pixel for anonymous usage counts, no third parties), and free to read forever. The donation path exists to make that sustainable, not to gate access.