# 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

<form class="donation-form" hidden>
<p><label for="donation-amount">Amount in francs, if you want to fix it</label>
<input id="donation-amount" name="amount" type="text" inputmode="decimal" autocomplete="off" placeholder="e.g. 50.00" aria-describedby="donation-note"></p>
<p><label for="donation-message">Message to the association, if you want to add one</label>
<input id="donation-message" name="message" type="text" maxlength="140" autocomplete="off" placeholder="Spende OpenHelvetia" aria-describedby="donation-note"></p>
<p id="donation-note" class="hint"></p>
</form>
<div class="donation-qr"><img src="../../../files/donation-qr.svg" alt="Swiss QR Code — donation to OpenHelvetia"></div>
<script type="module" src="../../../files/qr/donate.js"></script>

| | |
|---|---|
| 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.

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Source: about/en/financing.md