Wiki · Funding
Funding
Honest disclosure of who pays for Policy Window today. If you read the funding model and the editorial line together and they tell different stories, the funding model is wrong. We publish this so that's detectable.
1 · Headline disclosure
No current cash funding from any AI lab, regulator, government agency, or political party. Policy Window is operated by its founder (Ryan Wong) at personal cost, with in-kind dependencies listed below. There are zero paying customers as of 2026-05-29 — see §3 for the live register.
2 · In-kind dependencies (running costs)
We rely on third-party services to host, build, and run the wiki. Each dependency is named here, with the editorial relationship spelled out so you can verify there is no undisclosed exchange.
| Vendor | What they provide | Relationship + cost |
|---|---|---|
| Fly.io | Compute + volume hosting at policywindow.org. Single machine, persistent SQLite volume. | Standard paid plan. No discount, sponsorship, or editorial relationship. |
| Anthropic | Claude API used during research-workspace operations (paradigm classification, briefing draft composition, source-grounding checks). Never used to write public wiki article prose. See /wiki/ai-disclosure for the boundary. | Pay-as-you-go API credits at standard rates. No research grant, no model-access discount, no editorial arrangement. |
| GitHub | Source-code hosting + issue tracker for the corrections workflow. | Free public-repo tier. No paid plan. |
| Cloudflare | DNS for policywindow.org. | Free tier. No CDN / WAF interception of editorial content. |
If a dependency materially changes (paid grant, sponsored hosting, free model access from a vendor with a stake in governance outcomes), it is added here within 7 days of the arrangement starting. The page diff is captured in git log for any journalist or auditor who wants to verify the disclosure history.
3 · Live register of paying customers
The roadmap monetisation is a paid SLA-backed JSON firehose for enterprise compliance teams (see /wiki/charter §4 for the commercial-editorial firewall design that gates this before any contract is signed). Until that ships, this register is empty by definition.
Zero paying customers as of 2026-05-29. When the first customer signs, they appear here within 30 days with: organisation name, product (firehose / channel / audit), commercial value range, and any editorial relationship (typically: none — see charter §4).
Why publish the register at all? Sponsor capture is the §13 risk that hollows out trust faster than any AI-paper-mill accusation. A live, named register makes it impossible for a single sponsor to bias the editorial line without that bias being externally legible. Cochrane and What Works Network publish funder lists for the same reason.
4 · What we will not accept
- Editorial-conditioned funding. Any arrangement where money or in-kind support is contingent on covering, omitting, or framing a specific topic, instrument, or actor.
- Anonymous donations >£500. Below that threshold the operational burden of source-verification outweighs the disclosure value; above it the donor is named in §3 or the donation is refused.
- Sponsored content slots on
/wiki/articles. The catalog is not advertising real estate. Articles render only from typed catalog rows; there is no position in the codebase where sponsor copy could be injected. - Per-output payment for partner briefs. We do not invoice per-brief because that creates an APC-style volume incentive (see assessment §15 weak moats). When the firehose ships, pricing is per-tenant subscription, not per-artefact.
5 · How to verify
This page is updated by the same humans who maintain the catalog. There is no automated funding-disclosure feed yet; drift is caught by reviewers and by anyone who reads git log src/app/wiki/funding/page.tsx and sees an undisclosed funding relationship in the diff. The accountability mechanism is the same as for the catalog: honest disclosure that can be checked against the public record, plus a corrections workflow when it fails.
To report a suspected undisclosed relationship, open a GitHub issue against the repo with the label funding-disclosure. Issues in that label are responded to within 7 days.