Support and costs
DashStar Network is free. It will earn no revenue until a pilot proves its accuracy.
How DashStar is funded
- Tips from people who want to help.
- Sponsors.
- Cloud credits to cover hosting as it grows.
- A future crowdfunding campaign for a v1 camera that costs far less than the research prototype.
- Grants, later.
None of these are open yet.
Tip link: not set up yet.
Sponsor link: not set up yet.
Crowdfunding campaign: not launched yet.
MOAT Safety is a Texas sole-proprietorship DBA, not a charity.
What your money does not buy
Supporting DashStar never buys a plate lookup, a place on or off the alert list, data of any kind, or priority of any kind.
Costs, in public
Running costs will be published here from real invoices, with the date they were generated. Today there are no invoices to show.
| Item | Cost today | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| This website | Expected near $0 a month | Static pages on a free hosting tier, while the site stays static. |
| Domain | No extra cost | DashStar lives on a subdomain of moatsafety.com. |
| Network back end | $0 | Not built yet. |
Looking ahead
An estimate from published cloud prices in October 2026, not an invoice: about $0 a month up to roughly 6,000 devices, and about $10 a month at 100,000 devices. That is cheap because plates are checked in the car, not on a server.
The real limit is people. At 100,000 devices, reviewing matches could take about 67 reviewer-hours a day at the match rate assumed in planning. That number will be replaced with a measured one.