About us
Financing
What the association lives on, what money does not buy, how a donation arrives and what use costs.
What the association lives on
The association lives on its members' contributions, on donations and on grants. Using the base tier costs nothing; the operation behind it costs something, and that is what these funds carry:
- Operations — servers, domains and the gateways that keep the directory and the chat publicly reachable, including the model cost of every question a visitor asks.
- Standard and verification — maintenance of the open manifest standard and of the checks that measure every entry against its own declarations.
- Grants — payments to people and organisations who build on the open core, under published grant rules, not at discretion (Art. 2 no. 5 of the statutes).
What applies to donations
- Admission and donation are separate. An entry comes in through one of the three admission routes under published, non-discriminatory criteria. Donations go into the operation, not into the directory.
- Surpluses stay with the association. They serve the operation and expansion of the platform, as the statutes lay down (Art. 16 and 17).
- Donors stay private. Of a payment the association sees what the bank delivers: name, amount, date. That serves the bookkeeping. Named publicly is whoever expressly wishes it.
Donate
| Recipient | OpenHelvetia, 6330 Cham |
| Reference | 01 00000 00000 00000 00000 12918 |
| IBAN for manual transfers | CH87 0900 0000 1697 2947 1 |
Tariff
The tariff is an instrument of transparency: published, identical for everyone, with a review cadence and an adjustment clause. What stands today is stated here; what the board has yet to decide is shown as open, never estimated as a price.
| Tier | Price |
|---|---|
| Base — navigation, structured queries, the registry (stateless) | Zero tariff (free of charge) |
| Semantics — semantic search including its index | open, board decision pending |
| Generation — generative steps | open, board decision pending |
| Parallelism — parallel agent orchestration, agent-to-agent | open, board decision pending |
For the resource-intensive tiers no number exists yet: the tariff package is a board proposal and is adopted together with the platform regulations.
The mechanics:
- Postpaid, with a hard cap. What is billed is measured consumption, no balance, no prepayment. Once the cap is reached the request is refused, never silently throttled.
- Review cadence. The tariff is reviewed on a published cadence; the cadence is part of the tariff package the board adopts.
- Adjustment clause. Adjustments follow a published procedure and never apply retroactively.
Sponsoring by public-benefit bodies: municipalities, cantons, the Confederation, public-law bodies, non-profit organisations and educational institutions can cover the cost for their visitors. Eligibility is a published rule, not a discretion. As long as sponsor budget remains, the sponsor pays; once it is spent, a logged-in visitor visibly falls back to their own quota. Sponsors see aggregated figures, never content and never individuals.