Revenue Streams#

The collection, transformation and provision of high-quality data incurs costs[1] that have to be covered. From a democratic perspective, however, legislative data should be easily accessible (i.e. open) to (political) actors and citizens to enable them to be informed and participate. Thus, we want to provide “core data”, meaning unrefined data we collect from parliaments via their websites or via APIs free of charge. This results in a collective action problem with regard to financing, comparable to (other) open source software (OSS) and digital commons projects.[2] Next, we will explore different business models within literature and existing OSS, digital commons, open data and data space initiatives and projects with the sole focus of deriving and evaluating possible revenue streams in regard to our data infrastructure ex ante. Therefore, the following list of business models is neither exhaustive nor free of overlapping characteristics.

Legend: 1 = first priority, focus during prototype; 2 = second, future priority; 3 = last priority or not applicable

Freemium Business Models#

Business Model[3]	Description[3]	Revenue Streams	Evaluation	Prio	Expected Revenue 26 (CHF)
Freemium	Giving away a core product/service for free and selling a premium product/service via a subscription or usage fee	Charge usage fees for: • enriched or additional (including third party) data • advanced analytics • real-time data • extensive API use[4]	Given the goals of the project, we will further evaluate users needs to determine demand for enriched or additional data (e.g. policy lifecycle, text data, private data; cf. Use Cases and Contributions) and analytics comparing them to respective implementation costs and deciding on offerings. At the current stage, we offer real-time (daily) core data without any rate limits. Implementing an API gateway with rate limits and/or free access to e.g. weekly or monthly updated data would be possible with reasonable effort and would go in line with our principles.	1	50’000 (including membership fees and enterprise licenses)
Membership, Cooperative Model[5]	Users, providers and contributors become members of the data intermediary and are granted access to governance privileges and potentially premium products/services (cf. Freemium).	Tiered membership fees	Given the principles and continuous involvement of stakeholders, a membership model including governance privileges would be obvious. We will evaluate possible membership tiers during the project including whether potential premium products/services (cf. Freemium) should be offered through membership tiers or through separate subscription or usage fees (decoupling governance and access).	1	see above
Dual Licensing	Applying either open (free) or closed (paid-for) licences to the product/service under different conditions	(Tiered) closed licenses: • for commercial usage • for LLMs • based on company size or revenue from usage • including service level agreements	During the project, we will evaluate whether it is more feasible to charge fees based on the kind and/or amount of data used (cf. Freemium) or the purpose for which it is used (Dual License).	1	see above
Charging for Changes	Charging the data subjects to include or update their information (especially if they are obliged to provide information to a public body e.g. a register)	Charge parliaments the cost to integrate and update their data	Parliaments are not obliged to provide their data neither as OGD nor to a central database. However, parliaments could contribute to data integration due to intrinsic or extrinsic (political pressure[6]) motivation. This could go hand in hand with supplying their data as OGD (ideally through an API) and according to eCH standards (as well as consulting) reducing our integration costs. This option will be explored from 2027.	2	0
Open Source Software (OSS)	Offering OSS to enable businesses to use source code for free but charge on an ‘added-value’ basis and through dual licensing	E.g. Charge companies for commercial usage of software	Our software is fully open source (cf. principles) and has no unique selling point.	3	-
Free, as Branded Advertising	Providing data to promote a company and its products	Indirect	As a sole data infrastructure, there is no company or product to advertise and subsidize. Furthermore, the costs of distribution and usage are not very low which is a prerequisite.[3]	3	-

Premium Business Models#

Business Model[3]	Description[3]	Revenue Streams	Evaluation	Prio	Expected Revenue 26 (CHF)
Sponsorship	Giving away a product/service for free while receiving money from sponsors or advertisers (uncoupling usage and funding)	• One-time or recurring donations by data users, beneficiaries and supporters • One-time or recurring grants by institutional funders (governmental, philanthropic)	So far, we have been relatively successful with acquiring institutional funding. Especially during the scale up phase of the infrastructure, we will depend on grants and donations to maintain and expand our data infrastructure.	1	100’000
Support and Services	Selling support and services, such as training, technical support, or consulting related to the core product/service (but disentangled from their licenses)	• Consult parliaments to publish their data as OGD and/or eCH standard compliant • Selling: ◦ prioritisation on features and bug fixes (both in data and its provision) ◦ customer support ◦ training to data users ◦ data analysis ◦ certification of software implementations (e.g. council information systems)	As usage proliferates we will be confronted with requests for support and services which we can then explore further.	1	20’000
Demand-oriented Platform	Intermediaries charge users for the added value built into the original (raw) data through aggregation, curation and enrichment activities that allow aligning the final output with users’ needs.	see Freemium	This business model essentially describes what we are doing but the core data will be free and open.	-	cf. Freemium
Supply-oriented Platform	Intermediaries charge data providers a monthly fee to manage, store and maintain their data.	Charge parliaments	This is a role currently filled by suppliers of council information systems. They are a crucial partner in our endeavor when it comes to developing and implementing eCH standards and APIs. Taking this role would furthermore contradict the principles of a data space.	3	-
White-label Development	Offering a product/service to other companies for them to customise, brand and market it	Charge companies for white-labeling	Since we currently only supply open data this is not feasible.	3	-
Premium	Offering high-end services and products (while usually seeking a high-profit margin while targeting a lower sales volume)	Selling API access through a subscription or usage fee	Making even the core data subject to a fee would contradict our principles and goals of the initiative.	3	-

Cost-saving Business Models#

Business Model[3]	Description[3]	Revenue Streams	Evaluation	Prio	Expected Revenue 26 (CHF)
Increasing Quality through Participation / Crowdsourcing	Maintaining the data and increasing its quality by enlisting the help (update, cleaning, feedback) of other parties who benefit from having the data (This business model does not completely cover costs)	Enable scientists, journalists, developers, public servants and interested parties to contribute to reduce costs; no revenue	In line with the goals of the project, we will explore enabling users to contribute (cf. Contribution).	1	0
Cost Reduction	Reducing overall publishing costs through proactively publishing FAIR “raw” data meeting the needs of different target groups (instead of different specialized products or reactively answering to freedom of information (FOI) requests only catering to individual target groups)	None	Since we are a data intermediary our data is not affected by FOI and OGD laws.	3	-

Further Business Models#

Business Model[3]	Description[3]	Revenue Streams	Evaluation	Prio	Expected Revenue 26 (CHF)
Supporting Primary Business	Providing data naturally supports the primary business goal of the organisation e.g. by other organisations building data-driven products that can be used by the data provider or drive revenue or efficiency of its products/services	None	As a data infrastructure there is no other primary business goal.	3	-
Infrastructural Razor and Blades	Datasets are stored for free on cloud computing platforms being accessible by everyone via APIs (“razor”) while re-users are charged only for the computing power that they employ on-demand in as-a-service mode (“blades”). This model is limited to contexts and domains in which the computational costs are significant.	Charging users for API calls	In our case, computational costs are not significant.	3	-