Support our research

Index is free to use. It isn’t free to run.

Index is our open record of the technology companies building for entertainment, and anyone in the industry can search it for free. We are commercialise the product to cover costs but right now this sits with us.

Here’s exactly what it costs us to keep it running, and how you can help cover it.

See how you can help

Index in numbers

What you’re searching

Counted from our own database on 17 September 2026.

5,825

companies you can search today, out of 10,359 we’ve tracked since July 2026

8,965

company websites read and broken into 222,408 passages, so results reflect what companies actually do

1,100

web searches a day, on average, looking for companies we don’t have yet

1,404

companies that closed, archived rather than deleted, so the record keeps its history

One search

Under two cents

Every search you run on Index makes two AI calls. In September, those calls averaged about 1.3 cents per search.

Understand

An AI model reads your question and works out what you’re really looking for.

Match

We compare it against 5,825 company profiles and the website passages behind them.

Rank

A second AI call reads the closest matches and puts the best ones first.

Searching is the cheap part. Most of the cost goes into building the index you search.

Building the index

The part nobody sees

Most of our AI spending has nothing to do with searches. It goes into finding companies, reading their websites and writing each one up so it can be found. In September, 94% of our AI spending went into building and maintaining the index, and about 3% into answering searches.

Find

About 1,100 web searches a day turn up companies building for entertainment. We check each result against what we already hold before spending anything on it.

Read

We read up to 20 pages of each company’s website. So far that’s 8,965 websites.

Profile

An AI model writes a full profile from what it read: what the company does, who it serves and where. Each one costs about half a cent, and we wrote 2,548 in September.

Maintain

We check regularly that every company is still trading, which came to 9,033 checks in the last 30 days. When a company closes, we archive it.

current monthly cost

$228 a month

What it takes to keep Index running for everyone in the industry: the services it runs on, plus a share of the tools we build it with. That comes to $2,736 a year, in Australian dollars.

See the full breakdown

How to help

Help keep Index free

$228 a month keeps Index open to everyone in the industry. Here are three ways you can help cover it.

Buy from the shop

Every purchase helps keep Index free.

Visit the shop →

Contribute directly

Put money straight toward the monthly running cost, once or on a regular basis. Any amount helps.

Contribute here →

Sponsor searches

Put your name on the results people see: “This search, thanks to [your organisation].”

Talk to us about sponsoring →

Full cost breakdown

Running costs

Web search (Serper)

How we find new companies: about 1,100 searches a day.

$49

AI models (OpenRouter)

Understanding searches, ranking results and writing company profiles.

$35

Company data, screenshots and email

NinjaPear for company details, ScreenshotOne for website images and Postmark for email.

$70

Build and maintain

Claude Max, 35% of $140

The AI coding assistant we use to build and improve Index.

$49

Lovable Business, 35% of $70

The platform Index is built and hosted on.

$25

Total

That’s $2,736 a year.

$228 / month

Why 35%?

We count 35% of our development tools toward Index. The real share is higher, because most of that work goes into Index, but we’d rather understate the cost than overstate it.

Figures as at 17 September 2026, in Australian dollars. Our services and subscriptions bill in US dollars, so we’ve converted at US$1 = A$1.40 and rounded to the nearest dollar. Usage and volumes come from our own database, service costs from our monthly bills, and subscription costs from each plan’s published price. We’ll update this page as the numbers change.