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.
Louisiana is live — and it’s the biggest one yet
341,000+ appellate opinions — more than the other three states combined — covering the Louisiana Supreme Court and all five Courts of Appeal, back to 1809. It went live in August 2026 with the statute graph, verbatim holdings, a 1.5-million-edge citation graph, semantic search, and the sitting bench of all six courts seated. Funded by readers: the $250 goal covered the embedding run and the first year of added hosting and storage for a corpus that more than doubled this site. Thank you.
The work that remains there is the part we said we’d do: six years of Louisiana Supreme Court decisions are still missing from the big public archives (their feed broke in 2020 and never recovered). We found the hole, we published the gap honestly on our About page, and the direct-from-the-court backfill is next. Continued support pays for that and for the state after it.
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.