Costs
FOIA is cheap to start and expensive to finish.
The postage is trivial. The eighteen months of follow-up are not, and that is what the filing fee pays for. Every line of it is published on every request, because a contributor is buying an attempt and is owed the arithmetic.
Free
$0
Everything the archive holds, and every way to make it bigger that does not cost money.
- Read every request, document and disposition
- Propose requests on the Docket
- Vote on the queue
- Contribute any amount to any proposal
- Full public API, no key required
Aletheca Pro
$9/moor $79 a year
The assistance and the member surfaces on this archive. Sold on its own, because plenty of people want the FOIA machine and not an atlas of megaliths.
- Drafting assistance — describe what you want, get a filable request
- Ask the archive — questions across every request, document and event
- An allowance of commissioned requests each month
- Private drafts before a proposal goes public
- Eligibility for the per-request embargo
Thaumatica All-Access
$19/moor $179 a year
Everything above, plus Pro on every other archive in the house — present and future — on one subscription and one invoice.
- Everything in Aletheca Pro
- Pro on Mysteria, Libra Esoterica and UAP Nexus
- Every archive the house adds later, at no extra cost
- One subscription, one invoice, one place to cancel
- A pooled house credit balance that spends anywhere
Per-request
From $15
No subscription needed. Commission a request, pay for it once, and it is filed and tracked in public.
- $15 filing and follow-up, per request
- Postage at cost plus a stated margin, when mail is used
- Agency fees quoted before they are paid, never charged silently
- Embargo surcharge from $49 per request, 12 months
What a request is actually made of
A portal or email request costs nothing to send. Its real cost is the year of chasing that follows, and that is the $15 line — drafting, review, the statutory clock, and every follow-up until the agency answers or the remedies are exhausted.
Mailed requests add print and postage. Aletheca charges these at the vendor rate plus a stated margin rather than marking them up silently: an archive that takes a position on transparency and then hides a postage markup has a bad paragraph waiting to be written about it.
Agency fees are different. Search and duplication fees are frequently waived on a public-interest showing, and Aletheca argues for a waiver on every federal request — a service that publishes every page it receives, free, has an unusually strong case. Where a waiver is denied and a fee is charged, the estimate is shown to whoever is paying before a cent moves.
Mailed request, worked example
- Certified + electronic return receipt$9.85
- Prepaid return envelope$2.75
- Filing and follow-up$15
Of which roughly $8.90 is vendor print and postage at cost, $5.74 is the extra services, and the rest is Aletheca’s. Every request page shows this table for that request.
Contributions are not purchases
You are buying an attempt
Not a document. Many attempts return nothing at all, and the response is published either way. This is said at the point of payment, in plain language, rather than in the terms of service.
Nothing is charged until quorum
A contribution authorises a charge; the card is charged when the proposal is actually funded and filed. If it never reaches quorum, nothing is taken.
Stalled money is yours
A proposal that sits below quorum can have its pledges redirected to another proposal or released, at each contributor's choice. Unspent money does not quietly become ours.
Where the money goes
Filing fees and margins fund the operational cost of the archive: the follow-up labour that is the dominant cost of this discipline, scanning and OCR of paper responses, hosting and full-text indexing of every page in perpetuity, and appeals. Sites that integrate Aletheca receive a share of the platform fee on requests they originate — never a share of postage or agency fees, because a partner should not earn more when a letter goes certified. The integration terms are published.