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Non-commercial cost-only pricing
Institutions pay only what it costs to process their documents. No profit margin. No hidden fees. The methodology on this page is the basis of every invoice.
Transparency
What we spend, and why.
Most document accessibility providers do not publish their costs. EquitableDocs does. Every category of cost the platform depends on is listed on this page. Specific amounts are shared during onboarding and reviewed quarterly.
01 What transparency means here
Three commitments.
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Free for individuals
Students with print disabilities, faculty authors, and library staff never pay. The service is funded by university partnerships and by the founder until partnerships are in place.
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Updated quarterly
This page is reviewed every three months. If our costs change, you see the change here before it appears on any invoice.
02 What institutions pay for, and what they do not
Infrastructure costs only, at this stage.
The price an institutional partner is charged covers the running costs of the workflow: server and hosting, math and STEM processing APIs, automated PDF tagging APIs, and related infrastructure. Practitioner time is not charged at this stage. The price does not include profit margin, marketing spend, or a sales commission.
The exact cost depends on document complexity. Scanned documents cost more than native PDFs, and STEM content with equations costs more than plain text. We determine this during the sample analysis step of onboarding, based on real costs for that specific document type. Specific quotes are not published on this page; they are calibrated per institution and shared in the onboarding call.
The longer-term goal is independence, not dependency. The 12 to 18 month capacity-building partnership trains your team to run the pipeline internally. Training and pipeline setup are free; only travel and on-site logistics for trainers are charged at cost-recovery, waivable on need. Within 12 to 18 months, the goal is for your institution to process accessible documents independently.
03 Infrastructure
The components that keep the platform running.
We publish the component list so you can see exactly what the service depends on. Specific amounts are shared during onboarding and reviewed quarterly.
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Server and hosting
VPS at Hetzner or DigitalOcean. Domain at GoDaddy. The static site at GitHub Pages, no fee.
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Software and processing tools
PDFix SDK (licensed, amortised across documents processed). Mathpix Convert API (per-page charge, STEM content only). Tesseract OCR, veraPDF validation, ClamAV virus scanning: open licence, no fee.
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Delivery and security
Email delivery via Resend. SSL certificates via Let's Encrypt, no fee.
We use open licence tools wherever the result is as good or better. Not because they are free, but because they are auditable and not controlled by a single vendor.
04 Progress
Honest counters.
These numbers update as we work. EquitableDocs started in March 2026. If a number is zero, it means that milestone has not been reached yet. We will not inflate these numbers.
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Documents remediated
Coming online with the portal.
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University partners
Coming online with the portal.
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Community of Practice members
Coming online with the portal.
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Languages served
Coming online with the portal.
These counters will be connected to the database when the portal is deployed. Until then they are updated manually.
05 How we count
So you can verify our numbers.
Documents remediated. A document is counted as remediated when it has passed veraPDF validation and been delivered to the student, faculty member, library staffer, or institution. Documents that fail validation or are still in progress are not counted.
Per-document pricing. Pricing depends on complexity. A short native PDF with simple text is at the low end. A scanned document with tables and images is at the high end. The exact price for a batch is determined during the sample analysis step of university onboarding, not published as a list.
Specialist review time. Internally, we track specialist time at a fair-value hourly rate, used consistently whether the work is done by paid specialists or by Community of Practice volunteers. We do not claim volunteer labour is free in our own accounting. That said, specialist time is not currently billed to institutional partners; only infrastructure costs are. As the operating model evolves, this page will reflect any change before it appears on an invoice.