Donate / sponsor

v1 status: we are NOT YET accepting donations.

This page exists so you can see what we'd do with money when we're ready to take it, and so we have somewhere honest to point you in the meantime.

Why we're not accepting yet

Until a not-for-profit entity (Section 8 company under Indian law) is registered, donations can only be routed to a personal account. That creates two problems:

Tax + audit exposure for the recipient.
Confusion about the public-good positioning — money in a founder's personal account is not the same as money received by a community project, even if every rupee is spent on the project.

So we wait. The Section 8 registration is in the deferred-until-traction column (see ADR-0002). When v1 has organic traction (1k+ weekly visitors, first verified contributor, first grant interest), we'll trigger the entity registration and update this page.

What we'd spend money on (when we can)

In rough priority order:

Verification call labour. The core moat. Part-time verifier paying ₹15-30k/month per city to maintain the 30-day phone cadence. At 600+ records, this is a salaried role per metro.
RTI filing fees + postage. Each RTI costs ₹10 + postage. Pan-India coverage means hundreds of RTIs across 28 state health departments. ~₹50k/year at scale.
Hosting + Cloudflare Workers paid tier. Currently free-tier. At >100k req/day the Worker cost is ~₹2-4k/month.
Independent legal review of disclaimers, takedown process, and dispute handling — ₹15-30k/audit, repeated annually.
Native-speaker translation review for Hindi, Kannada, Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, Bengali, Malayalam — ₹5-10k per language for a one-time critical-strings pass.
Third-party WCAG accessibility audit — ₹50-100k/audit.
Volunteer city-captain stipends — small monthly honoraria (₹2-5k) to recognise verifier time.

We will publish, monthly, what came in and what went out. The audit trail will live in finance/ in the repo. No money will be spent that isn't reported.

What we won't take money for, ever

Provider placement. No ranking changes for sponsorship.
Removal of negative user reports. Disputed reports follow the process in /takedown. Money does not buy outcomes.
Removal of affiliation edges. Sourced edges stay unless contrary evidence arrives.
Faster verification queue position for a specific provider.
White-labelling the dataset — the commercial licence requires attribution; that doesn't change with sponsorship.

What you can do today (instead of money)

Verify one provider this week. Pick a record marked unverified, call the number, open a PR via CONTRIBUTING.md. This is more valuable than ₹1000 of sponsorship.
Translate a screen. The Hindi and Kannada strings need a native review. Open a PR against site/src/i18n/strings.ts.
File an RTI with your state's health department. The templates are here.
Spin up a mirror in a different region — see MIRRORING.md.
Tell your hospital's ER staff this exists. Word-of-mouth is the unfunded growth engine.

Future grant targets

When the entity is registered, the grants we'd apply to (in order of fit):

Wikimedia Foundation — Project Grants programme, public-good civic data.
Mozilla Foundation — public-interest technology track.
Mozilla MOSS — open-source software grants.
Bloomberg Philanthropies — Public Health track.
Omidyar Network India — digital public infrastructure.
Open Society Foundations — health information access.
State-level civic-tech funds (Karnataka Innovation & Technology Society, etc.).

Application tracker (when active): GRANTS.md.

Commercial licensing as a revenue source

The dual-licence model (CC BY-NC-SA + bilateral commercial) is an opportunistic revenue path, not a planned one. If a for-profit ingestion request arrives, we'll quote case-by-case. Any commercial revenue goes into the same audit trail above.

This page will be re-written the day we open donations. Until then, contributions of time are what matters most.