Akron Akron Pulse / Open Books
Financials
Every dollar, published. A county-wide events calendar doesn't need a big budget, so here's the whole bill, updated as prices change.
What it's worth
Akron Pulse doesn't sell anything, so there's no revenue to report. What there is instead is local spending facilitated: money spent at Summit County venues and businesses when Akron Pulse helps someone show up to something. As Akron Pulse expands, so does the percent of Summit County's 430,701 adults that go to one extra thing a year because of it. If they spend about $29.77 locally per outing, excluding admission, the local-attendee figure from Americans for the Arts, AEP6 study findings, you can see the clear economic impact it will deliver.
For scale: today's measured reach is 3,127 annual users, which at our deliberately low assumptions (1 in 10 attending one extra thing, $25 spent) comes to about $7,818 a year. That reach is young and spiky, so expect it to move. None of the money on this page comes to Akron Pulse; we don't take a cut of anything.
a year into Summit County businesses
4,307 adults, one extra outing each, $29.77 spent locally per outing: $128,220.
At this adoption level Akron Pulse would cost about $2,916 a year to run, about 0.6¢ per Summit County resident: today's real bill plus vendor list prices evaluated at the traffic and subscriber list this adoption level implies. Even at that cost, this is 44x the cost in local spending.
The levels are named assumptions, not forecasts; only Today is measured, and the slider cannot go below it. The adult count comes from Census QuickFacts, Summit County, OH.
Where the money goes
The complete monthly bill in priority order, essentials first, next to a live figure at the adoption level picked in the calculator above; slide it to 100% to see the full-region scenario. The $0 lines are real: picking services with generous free tiers is most of the cost strategy. Prices verified August 17, 2026.
| Line item | Todayabout 2,900 monthly active users | At this adoption · 1%live, from the slider |
|---|---|---|
| Core technologies | ||
| Supabase | $25 | $25 |
| The database: every event, venue, and subscriber | ||
| ||
| Vercel | $21 | $21 |
| Hosting, edge delivery, and image optimization | ||
| DataImpulse | $5 | $6 |
| Residential proxy bandwidth ($1/GB) for the handful of sources that block datacenter traffic | ||
| Domain | $2 | $2 |
| akronpulse.com, registered at Hover ($18.99/yr) | ||
| Google Workspace | $34 | $34 |
| Email for akronpulse.com (byron@ and intake@ mailboxes) | ||
| Data collection | $0 | $0 |
| 153 scrapers run nightly on GitHub Actions, free while the repository is public | ||
| Claude Max | $100 | $100 |
| AI tooling: scraper upkeep, nightly data-quality review. This line is what stands in for the data administration and development lines below, which read $0 because nobody has been paid for that time | ||
| Nice to have | ||
| Email digests | $20 | $20 |
| Subscriber digests via Resend; grows with the subscriber list | ||
| Maps | $0 | $0 |
| MapLibre + OpenFreeMap, free to use, community funded | ||
| Marketing | ||
| Marketing and advertising | $0 | $5 |
| Getting the word out: print, social, and event promotion. Nothing spent yet; the at-scale column budgets ~10% of operating costs | ||
| People | ||
| Data administration | $0 | $5 |
| Curating the dataset: review queue, dedupe, venue and category fixes, partner listings. Nobody's been paid yet; the at-scale column budgets part-time paid work | ||
| Development and upkeep | $0 | $25 |
| Building and maintaining the software: new features, bug fixes, infrastructure. Nobody's been paid yet; the at-scale column budgets a fractional engineer (~25 hours a month at regional contract rates) | ||
| Total | $207 | $243 |
| Per year | $2,484 | $2,916 |
| One-off expenses (2026) | ||
| 2026-05-28 | Extra Claude tokens used to increase early stage development velocity | $401 |
| Total | $401 | |
Who helps cover it
Sponsors pay part of the bill above and get their name in this section. That is the whole arrangement, and a thank-you here is the only thing money buys: no placement in any listing, no influence over which events get covered or how they rank, no mention in the email digest, and no access to subscriber data. Akron Pulse stays free, with no paywall and nothing sold anywhere else on the site, and that only stays true because this line does not move.
Embedded around Summit County
Community sites carrying the Akron Pulse calendar on their own pages. Everyone here agreed to be listed. It costs them nothing.
Run this for your city
Akron Pulse is open source. A calendar like this for your community costs $0 to start on free tiers, and about $48/month in infrastructure once you outgrow them. The code and this cost model are all public.
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$207 a month keeps this running for all of Summit County. Donations aren't set up yet. Leave your email and we'll let you know when they are. If you're a business rather than a neighbor, the sponsor ask above is live today.
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