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

• ~$100 per state, one-time: embedding the full corpus through Voyage AI’s legal model. Minnesota alone is ~60,000 opinions across nearly a century of decisions, totaling ~720 million tokens of legal text. 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: every semantic search you run hits Voyage’s API. Pennies per query, but they add up.
• Time: evenings and weekends, building scrapers, parsers, refactors, and editorial review — one state, one judge dossier, one tag at a time.

If you want to help fund the next state

Donation link coming soon. In the meantime, tell someone who’d find DocketDrift useful — that helps too.

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? Report it via the maintainer’s email on the about page. 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.