What you pay follows what you can carry
Schools and educational institutions in need pay what a run costs LoQuery and nothing on top, and every other price scales with the size of the organisation. The rule is published. This page names the parts that are not settled.
Ability to pay sets the price
Software is priced per seat by default, so a school of thirty pays thirty times a school of one and a bank pays what a rural board pays. Headcount is not a budget. LoQuery prices on ability to pay instead, measured against revenue or operating budget, so you can see which row your organisation sits in before writing to us. An institution that has to ask for a discount pays in dignity.
| Organisation | What it pays |
|---|---|
| Schools and educational institutions in need Public schools, under-resourced boards, and programmes with no budget line for this. | At cost. No profit. |
| Better-resourced schools, colleges and universities The same scale, further up. Identical software either way. | A share of cost |
| Mission-driven organisations Non-profits, charities, public-interest research and journalism. | Scaled to operating budget |
| Commercial research and analysis Firms, consultancies, and anyone billing a client for the work. | Commercial rate |
Run at cost, so a school can plan
At cost means the compute a run consumes, and LoQuery adds nothing on top: no list price to discount from, and no per-seat licence. A run costs cents. Serving one more classroom costs LoQuery close to nothing. A commitment this cheap survives a bad quarter, so a bursar at the floor can budget a year ahead on the published rule. Watch a run to see what those cents buy.
Small open models make the price possible
Search costs LoQuery nothing. Queries run in your browser, on your connection, while a hosted research tool buys every one of the dozens a run makes from a search API. LoQuery runs gpt-oss-120b, OpenAI's small open-weight release, served by Groq and Cerebras. Both are American companies. Per token these cost a fraction of a frontier model, and three attempts here still come in under the price of a single frontier answer. Every model and provider is named above, so a procurement office can check ours, and how it works covers the contracts that keep a small model in line.
Compute is the only thing we charge for
Every commercial run carries a margin from the first one, so you can plan on terms that do not have to change later. Schools at the floor pay compute with nothing added.
Funding is the part worth checking us on. A tool paid for by attention has to keep you using it, and the honest answer is rarely the one that keeps you there. There is no ad surface here, no engagement target, and no free tier that has to be kept worse than the paid one. Compute, and a margin on it, is LoQuery's only revenue. LoQuery publishes no accounts, so that line is a commitment too.
Our legal status claims nothing
Everything on this page is a commitment rather than a legal lock.
No statute holds LoQuery to any of it. We would rather say that plainly than borrow the authority of a legal structure LoQuery never built, so every registration named below is one you can look up.
- Incorporated as
- A company in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada.
- Social enterprise
- A description of purpose. The federal department that tracks the sector says social enterprises are not restricted to a corporate form, and that a business corporation, a non-profit or a co-operative can each be one. So the term certifies nothing.
- Charitable status
- None. LoQuery is not a charity and not a non-profit.
- Certified by
- Nobody. Not a B Corporation, and not certified by Buy Social Canada.
- The education wing
- Intended as a non-profit entity. Not built, not registered.
- The at-cost floor
- A commitment. Nothing in the incorporation requires it.
The principle is settled, the bands are not
The rule came first. Pricing was the constraint LoQuery was built to satisfy, so the schedule existed before there was anything to buy and is now awkward to change quietly. Write to [email protected] if you need a number today, and we will tell you where our thinking has got to.
Pricing scales with an organisation's revenue or operating budget, with schools in need at cost.