The scorecard is free for every transit agency, and it stays that way. An agency never pays to be scored or to see its fixes. Sponsorship covers the cost of running the service for everyone.
The public version of this page is gtfsscorecard.org/support. This document is the repository copy of the same commitments.
The core service costs single-digit dollars a month today. A $75 to $200 monthly operating envelope would add bounded capacity while keeping hard spending caps:
- Hosting and bandwidth for the static site, the read API, and the grade badges the project publishes.
- The scheduled daily data refresh: fetching more than 2,100 configured feed records in the current worldwide coverage, still mostly in the US and Canada. The public status page reports the exact current count and records when each run completed.
- Validator compute. Each refresh runs feeds through the canonical MobilityData gtfs-validator.
- Release monitoring and private evidence retention needed to reproduce a published check and to audit a remediation receipt if one is ever submitted.
A capped hosted one-off scorer remains an option if repeated demand justifies its abuse controls and operating cost. It is not enabled today; the site currently offers a local pre-publish check and a GitHub-backed request path. Sponsorship does not automatically start a cross-agency realtime archive or another expansion without a named user and a bounded plan.
Every service runs with a hard spending cap. If a cost line grows past this range, the design changes before the bill does.
Acknowledgment, deliberately little else. Sponsors are listed on the /support/ page and in the repository, with what their support pays for. Sponsorship buys no influence over grades, methodology, or which agencies are listed; the full rubric is public in docs/rubric.md.
The real return is the tool itself: it stays free for every agency, including the small and rural systems it was built for.
- Sponsor on GitHub, or open a sponsorship inquiry if you would rather talk first or need an invoice. No payment rail is advertised here until the account behind it can actually receive funds.
Organizations that support many agencies at once, such as state DOT programs and consultancies, sometimes need more than the public site: portfolio views across a region, or help reading results during agency check-ins. Paid services like that exist alongside the free tool and never replace it. Nothing is subtracted from the free tier to create them.
See the current consulting services and pricing, or write to Chelsea Kelly-Reif to start that conversation.