PorchLite is one person reading city agendas so a few thousand people don't have to. Any of these helps; none of them is expected.
PorchLite costs about $22.50 a month to run — a server, the AI that drafts each summary, and email. Every cent of it is on the finances page.
Payment is handled by Stripe; PorchLite never sees your card. PorchLite is run by Stricklin Development LLC, not a charity, so contributions are not tax-deductible. Every one shows up on the finances page — amount and date. Your name is only listed if you enter one, and a monthly contribution can be cancelled any time from the receipt Stripe emails you.
The whole thing is public under the AGPL — the scrapers, the summarizer prompt, the review workflow, all of it. You can audit exactly how a summary gets written, run your own copy for your own city, or send a fix.
The most useful contribution is usually a scraper. Every city publishes its agendas differently, and each new system is what unlocks the next set of cities.
Every summary is checked by a person against the original document before anyone reads it. That person is currently me, which is the single thing most likely to break as PorchLite grows.
Reviewers are unpaid volunteers. There's a short sample task first — you'll read a real agenda item and a draft summary and tell us what's wrong with it — and then a conversation. No experience with government required; being the kind of person who notices when a sentence is doing something sneaky is the whole job.
There is no fourth way that involves buying anything. PorchLite has nothing to sell, takes no advertising, and does not share who reads it.