Disclosure
No information is ever behind a price.
No information is ever behind a price. Not a course, not a claim, not a document, not a phone number, not a vote, not a bill, not a filing, not a figure. Not a slice of any of them, not sooner, and not more of them. If knowing a thing about your government is the point of this organisation, then selling it back is the one thing the organisation cannot do.
The ruling, in the founder’s words — 2026-08-29
“WE SHOULD JUST STATE EXPLICITLY NO INFORMATION FOR A FEE, AND WHEN USERS CHOOSE TIERS, SHOULD THEY CHOOSE, THEYLL REALIZE ITS ALL COSMETIC”
18
free forever
10
cost money
Eighteen things that will never have a price against ten that do, and every one of the ten is how something looks or how your own copy is arranged. If the second list ever grows in a way that touches the first, the build fails.
Everything that costs money
Every one of these declares what kind of thing it is, from a closed set of three. A feature that declares nothing cannot be sold — the build fails first.
How it looks
How something looks. Your profile, the app's theme, an icon colour, a song. Visible to you and to whoever visits you, and it tells nobody anything they could not already read.
app icon colour
The colour of the icon on your home screen. Added on the founder's ruling of 2026-08-29.
Nothing at all, functionally. That is the point.
embedded video
Custom embedded video on your profile.
Not posting video, which is free.
profile music
A song on your profile. Pure decoration.
Not required to have a profile.
profile theming
Background, banner, font, colours -- how your profile looks. MySpace-esque with our flavour, in the founder's words.
Not what your profile SAYS, and not who can see it. Privacy settings are free at every tier.
style panel
The code path: a safe subset of CSS, with the visual editor's own output already in it. More versatile than the pickers, for people who want that.
Not required to customise. The visual editor covers what most people want, and every picker change writes readable rules into this panel -- which is how a generation learned HTML, and for a literacy nonprofit is curriculum rather than coincidence.
ui switching
Whole-app themes. How the product looks to you and to nobody else.
Not accessibility settings. Contrast, text size and reduced motion are free and are on the never list, because for some people they are not a theme, they are the door.
How your own copy is arranged
How YOUR OWN copy of something is arranged. Pinning, collections, the order of your own feed. It changes nothing about what exists to read and nothing about what anybody else sees.
feed personalisation
It changes the arrangement of YOUR OWN feed and nothing about what exists to read. Nobody is kept from anything.
Not a ranking algorithm. The feed still has no ranking function at any price -- what this buys is your choice of arrangement, not ours.
pin to your own feed view
Pinning something to the top of the feed only you see. Purely your own convenience.
NOT pinning to your profile, which is free and is on the never list. If these two ever get merged, a free thing has been quietly sold.
saved collections
Organising your saved items into named collections. Saving itself is free.
Not saving. Saving is free, always.
Bought at cost, not sold at a margin
Something that costs the organisation real money per use and is bought at cost rather than sold at a margin. There is exactly one, and it buys a check about YOU rather than information about anybody else.
identity check access
Access to the third-party identity check. The check costs money to run and the tier covers it.
NOT the badge. Paying gets you into the queue; passing the check gets you the mark. Fail it and you keep the tier and its features and no refund is owed, because the tier delivered what it sells.
identity check access
A third party runs the check and charges per check. It is bought at cost, not sold at a margin.
What it does not buy: The badge. badge_from_payment() returns None and a test asserts it always will -- paying proves you paid, and the badge means somebody verified who you are.
$5 buys access to the check. The badge comes from the check. Fail it, keep the tier, no badge, no refund owed.
Free forever, at every tier
courses and modules
The curriculum is the exempt purpose. A paywalled civics course is a contradiction in terms.
quiz questions
Taking a quiz is learning. The ANSWERS are withheld from everyone equally, which is pedagogy, not pricing.
founding documents
The Constitution, the Articles, the Bill of Rights. Charging for the text of the founding documents would be indefensible in any room.
the record
Politicians, bills, votes, filings, agencies, lobbying. Public record, published by the government, republished with a citation.
bill text and progress
What a bill says and where it sits. A citizen who cannot afford $3 has the same stake in a bill as one who can.
politician contact details
Phone numbers and emails for people who work for you. Putting a price on reaching your representative is the single worst thing this product could do.
who represents me
Finding out who your officials are is the first step of every civic act there is.
elections and candidates
Who is running, what they have said, and the comparer. A voter is not a customer.
tax dollar breakdown
Where your money goes, including the foreign-assistance figures. It is your money.
local directory
Neighbourhood businesses that listed themselves. Free to list and free to read.
local feed and posting
Writing to your neighbours and reading what they wrote. A paid public square is not a public square.
marketplace
Board-approved as free, permanently. No money passes through Outpost at any point.
reactions and reposting
The eight reactions and the three ways to pass a post on. Basic speech, not a feature.
pin to your own profile
Founder ruling, 2026-08-29, explicitly free. Not to be confused with pinning to your own FEED VIEW, which is tier_3 -- see FEATURES. Two different pins, and conflating them would quietly paywall a free thing.
corrections and reporting
Telling us we got something wrong, and reporting something harmful. Charging for either would be charging for safety.
accessibility settings
Text size, contrast, reduced motion, screen-reader behaviour. These are not decoration; for some people they are the difference between a usable product and none.
data export and deletion
Getting your own words out, and getting them deleted. A person's own data is never a feature.
official verification
An elected official's badge is free. The badge exists so a constituent knows who they are talking to, and that benefit belongs to the constituent, not the officeholder.
The tiers
Last on the page on purpose. Nothing above this line changes depending on which one you pick.
free
Everything the organisation exists to do. The whole record, all the education, every government tool, the local layer, posting, reading, and pinning to your own profile.
tier 3
Personalisation of your own feed -- how YOUR corner is arranged. It changes nothing about what anybody else sees and nothing about what is available to read.
tier 5
The full look: UI switching, profile music, embedded video, background, banner, font, colours, app-icon colour, and access to the identity check. Decoration and a queue position, not knowledge.
If you stop paying
- Your posts and words
- untouched. They were never a feature.
- Your handle
- kept. 'At least once' means once.
- Your customisations
- kept in storage, not displayed while unpaid, restored exactly on resubscribe
- A badge you earned
- a verified badge earned by passing a check is NOT revoked by lapsing -- the check happened and the fact it established did not stop being true. Only a failed re-check removes it.
Deleting a person's work because a card expired is punitive, and it is a habit borrowed from businesses this organisation does not want to resemble.
What holds this up
The rule at the top of this page is not a promise somebody remembers to keep. These checks run on every build, and the build fails if any of them has something to say.
- a_feature_with_no_kind() -- nothing is sold without declaring what kind of thing it is
- information_behind_a_price() -- the sales pitch is read for the words that describe getting at information
- a_paid_feature_that_is_also_free() -- a name in both registers means one of them is lying
- badge_from_payment() -- payment never earns the verified badge
The same checks run when you ask, at /api/support/disclosure. That answer is never older than the code serving it.