LE LOYER
Qui finance Vigie
Gratuit ne veut pas dire sans coût. Qui paie la machine — et ce qui n'est jamais à vendre.
Vigie — Rent (how the lookout stays alive)
Honesty first: free to read does not mean free to run. Someone always pays.
Now
Who pays: the project bearer, out of pocket. No company, no donors, no ads.
What is covered: the domain, hosting (the free tiers of GitHub Actions and Vercel), and the bearer's time. Vigie buys no paid API and runs no language model: the pipeline is rule-based Python with no third-party service.
What we do not pretend: ads, donors, or “the community” are not funding Vigie. If this wallet closes, Vigie stops. That is the scar we accept.
Rule: do not scale ingest, enrich, or outreach beyond what this wallet can hold for 90 days without stress.
What free means
- Readers: free to open, free to leave, no account required.
- We do not sell “neutrality.” We publish method (
sources.yaml,ranking.md, this file). - We do not take editorial money that buys rank, or any money that buys a say over
what is shown.
The permanent no
Vigie is non-commercial, permanently (house law R7, decided 2026-09-19; see the legal page). No advertising, no subscription or paid tier, no sponsorship, no sale or licensing of data, no paid alerts, no B2B product, no membership that buys anything. Selling the rank, stealth native ads and “sponsored truth” are the fog this project exists to watch. The only way this could ever change is after the explicit authorisation of the publishers whose items Vigie relays, announced publicly on the legal page first.
Decision log
Append-only: earlier rows stay as written; later rows say what superseded them.
| Date | Decision | Owner |
|---|---|---|
| 2026-09-15 | v0 rent = the project bearer's wallet; free to read; no ads | co-founders |
| 2026-09-16 | Ambient morning digest = presentation of store only (no extra LLM/fetch). Paid alert delivery stays v1 — payload may reuse data/pulse/latest_morning.* without a second ranking brain. (Superseded 2026-10-06: there are no paid alerts.) | Bucky + the bearer |
| 2026-09-17 | Widget paste twin latest_morning.widget.txt ships with morning JSON/TXT/HTML; same pulse as Arrival + Stage | Bucky + the bearer |
| 2026-09-19 | Non-commercial permanently (R7): no ads, subscription, sponsorship or data resale | the bearer |
| 2026-10-06 | The former “v1 rent candidates” (optional paid alerts, B2B digest, patron membership) are withdrawn and no longer listed. The “LLM API calls” budget line is struck: no language model is used. | the bearer + co-founder |
Success / failure
- Right: readers return; method stays inspectable; the wallet lasts long enough to learn.
- Wrong: we scale as if free forever; or we sell the rank and become the fog we watch.