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.
Where the money goes
The complete monthly bill, largest line first, next to what the same bill looks like modeled at full-region adoption. The $0 lines are real: picking services with generous free tiers is most of the cost strategy. Prices verified July 8, 2026.
| Line item | What it covers | Todayunder 10k views/mo | At scale (modeled)~10M views/mo, full region adoption |
|---|---|---|---|
| Claude Max | 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 | $100 | $100 |
| Supabase | The database: every event, venue, and subscriber | $25 | $271 |
| Vercel | Hosting, edge delivery, and image optimization | $20 | $968 |
| DataImpulse | Residential proxy bandwidth ($1/GB) for the handful of sources that block datacenter traffic. Measured usage is under $1; held at $5 for headroom | $5 | $20 |
| Domain | akronpulse.com, registered at Hover ($18.99/yr) | $2 | $2 |
| Data administration | 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 | $0 | $500 |
| Development and upkeep | 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) | $0 | $2,500 |
| Marketing and advertising | Getting the word out: print, social, and event promotion. Nothing spent yet; the at-scale column budgets ~10% of operating costs | $0 | $500 |
| Maps | MapLibre + OpenFreeMap, free to use, community funded | $0 | $0 |
| Email digests | Subscriber digests via Resend; grows with the subscriber list | $0 | $385 |
| Data collection | 150 scrapers run nightly on GitHub Actions, free while the repository is public | $0 | $0 |
| Total | $152 | $5,246 | |
| Per year | $1,824 | $62,952 | |
| 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 $47/month in infrastructure once you outgrow them. The code and this cost model are all public.
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$152 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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