What this costs
What it costs to run this site.
This site asks riders for money, so it should say what the money is for. These are the actual amounts billed, read from the billing records themselves rather than estimated.
Total, per month
US$250.33
Measured September 8, 2026
Amounts are in US dollars, which is how these services are billed.
Period: recurring monthly charges active on the measured date. The annual domain invoice is shown at its billed amount and divided by 12 only for the monthly total.
Unpaid work is not included in this total.
See the five measured charges
| Item | What it pays for | Per month |
|---|---|---|
| Server | The machine that stores archived transit-feed predictions, answers the trip planner, and runs the live map | US$50.99 |
| Database storage | 120 GB for archived provider-feed predictions used in the reliability scores | US$9.20 |
| Backups | Nightly copies, so a failed disk does not erase the record | US$10.20 |
| Web hosting | Serving the site itself: every page, every search, every map tile request | US$178.30 |
| Domain names | The .ca and .com addresses, so the site is reachable whichever one a rider types | US$1.64Billed once a year, at US$19.65 |
| Total, per month | US$250.33 | |
What this total does not include
- The time spent building and running it. That is unpaid, and it is the largest real cost of the site by a wide margin.
A number that leaves something out should say so. Adding up only the parts that are easy to measure would understate what this takes.
These figures move
Hosting is the volatile line: it rises with how much the site is used and with how it is built, and it has risen sharply as more of the network history came online. It is a snapshot with a date on it, not a live meter, and it will be restated when it is measured again rather than quietly left to drift.
A separate procurement record
The City of Ottawa disclosure rows for the Transit app contract total CAD $1,157,794 across entries from 2023 through the first half of 2025. That delegated procurement covers rider technology, monitoring, surveys and other disclosed work. Otranspo’s figures above are a dated monthly operating-cost snapshot with different services, currency treatment, period and excluded labour. The two totals are linked as separate public records and are not a price or value-for-money comparison.
Read what the disclosures showIf you want to help cover it
Contributions are voluntary and change nothing about what any rider can see or do here. Everything on this site stays free whether or not anyone gives anything.