The Aporia
The Aporia
Everything The Aporia gives you is free. Keeping it free is not. The Aporia exists to make it easier to understand how the news is being covered, without putting that understanding behind a paywall, filling the site with advertising, or asking you to trust whoever happens to fund it. That is why the project asks for donations.
Reading this site costs nothing and will keep costing nothing. What costs money is the machinery underneath it: the servers, the storage, and the model time that turns raw coverage into something you can compare. A donation pays for that while the side of the project meant to fund it in the long run is built.
You do not pay for access. You do not pay for more features. You do not pay to see a different analysis.
Paying for access is not paying for influence. An organisation can pay to use The Aporia's data. It cannot pay to change what The Aporia says, how the analysis works, or what conclusions it reaches. That independence is one of the standing commitments on the about page.
API and dataThe goal is to keep The Aporia free without making it dependent on whoever has the deepest pockets.
The organisation-facing side of the project is not generating revenue yet. Until it does, donations are what bridge the gap between the free service and the cost of running it. That is the whole of the ask on this page.
The goal is not to build a surplus. It is to cover the cost of running The Aporia and leave enough room to keep improving it.
At its current size, The Aporia's basic operating costs are relatively small. The first call on the goal is what the project cannot operate without. That is the development tools it is built and maintained with, including the Claude Code subscription, the hosting that keeps the website and its services online, and the domain that keeps The Aporia reachable at its permanent address. After those come the tools the project needs as it grows, including Microsoft services and other business infrastructure. Anything beyond the essentials goes toward expanding the project. The long-term intention is to hire students as software engineers, and eventually to run hackathons that introduce more people to The Aporia while helping find people who can contribute to it. So the monthly target is not a salary, a profit target, or a large corporate budget. It is the amount the project currently believes it needs to keep moving.
Card payments are handled by Stripe. The Aporia does not receive or store card details. Full donation terms.
These figures are an example, not a decision. The Aporia has not taken any donations yet, and how the money should be divided is a question that needs money to answer. The split below is a plausible one, shown so you can see the shape of what gets published — not a commitment to these categories or these percentages. The real allocation will be set once donations are actually arriving, and it will be published here in the same form.
The allocation is published so you do not have to take the project's word for it, and publishing an example first is part of that: it shows the format the real one will arrive in, and it can be checked against what actually gets published later. The monthly record starts on 1 October 2026 — from then on, every month's donation total and its breakdown are published here, including the months that raise nothing.
The categories and percentages above are an example and have not been committed to. No monthly breakdown is published yet: the first one covers the first complete month after 1 October 2026, and every month after it is published whether or not it raised anything.
These shares apply to donation income only. Anything raised above the monthly goal carries over into the following month.
Donations should not disappear into a black box. Every month, the donation total and the allocation of that month's income are published, and a month with no donations stays on the record rather than being left out of it.
Donations received per calendar month, in CAD. Months with no donations are shown as empty rather than left out. The line marks the monthly goal of CA$500.
No month has closed with donations in it yet. Monthly records and their spreadsheets appear here as soon as one has.
Totals cover calendar periods in UTC. October 2026 covers that month only rather than the past 30 days, and 2026 covers the calendar year. Refunded donations are excluded from both figures.
Donations are never published with names attached, and no donor is listed on this page.
Understanding the news should not depend on who can afford it.
The intended future is one where the public side of The Aporia pays for itself through organisations using its data professionally. That is not where it is yet. Until it is, donations are what allow the work to continue without changing what The Aporia is for.
If you find The Aporia useful, even a small donation helps. Thank you for helping keep it independent.
The Aporia is an independent analysis layer over the news. It collects reporting from different publishers, groups the articles covering the same event, and examines each one using the same set of measurements.
The purpose is to make it easier to see how different accounts of the same event relate to one another.
The Aporia produces no reporting of its own. It starts with the event rather than the article: pieces arrive from 53 feeds as they are published, and the ones describing the same real-world event are brought together and treated as different accounts of one thing rather than as unrelated articles.
Each account is then measured against the same fixed questions:
Every figure is produced the same way for every source, so two outlets covering one event can be set against each other on equal terms. The measurements are not a verdict on the article. If two outlets describe an event differently, The Aporia does not choose between them: it is not a fact-checker, it never republishes an article's text, and every score here is an automated judgment rather than a statement of fact.
You do not have to take any of that on trust. Every measurement has a defined methodology, the limitations are documented, every article links out to the publisher that wrote it, and where the system is uncertain it says so rather than rounding the uncertainty away.
The point is not to replace your judgment. It is to give your judgment better material to work with.
the same event, reported separately
by what happened, not by keyword
the same questions, asked of every source
you compare, and decide
Most people now meet the news through a feed, and a feed is ranked to hold attention. The most dependable way to hold someone's attention is to show them more of what they already agree with. The problem that creates is subtler than anyone being lied to: over time the range of what a reader sees narrows, until the disagreement on the other side of it looks smaller and less considered than it actually is.
You would not ask a pharmacist to be your physician, even though a pharmacist knows a great deal about medicine. The knowledge is real and the role is different. A single outlet is in the same position. It can be careful, well sourced and worth reading, and still be one account of an event rather than the account of it.
So the useful unit is the comparison. Several reports of one event, set beside each other with the same measurements applied to each, tell you something none of them says on its own: where they agree, where they diverge, and which parts of the story only some of them thought worth including. That last one is usually the most informative, and it is the hardest to notice while reading a single article.
You don't need another news source. You need a way to understand them.
Reading one source
Reading them together
The Aporia is for people who occasionally want to go deeper than the news usually allows. You might recognise yourself here if:
It is not meant to replace the way you normally keep up with the news, and it is worse than a normal news app at the two-minute catch-up. There is no feed, nothing is ordered by what will hold your attention, and the site will not tell you which account is the correct one. Come here when something catches your attention and you decide it is worth investigating properly.
The two lists are worded differently because they are two different kinds of promise. The left column is absolute because nothing on it requires effort to keep, only a decision not to do it. The right column asks for judgment, and a project that promised those without qualification would be overclaiming on the same page where it asks you not to take claims on trust.
The Aporia is free to read and the intention is to keep it that way. It is paid for by donations, and the intended future is one where it largely pays for itself through organisations using its data professionally.
If those two do not cover what it costs to run, subscriptions or advertising may be added rather than the project quietly closing. That is not the plan and it is not wanted, but it is the honest answer to what happens if the money does not arrive, and saying so in advance is better than a reader finding out by meeting it.
If it happens, it will be said here first and the commitments above hold regardless: no political advertising, no selling of personal data about readers, and nothing anyone pays for will change a public conclusion or a published score. What the project costs to run, and what any donation goes toward, are itemised on the support page.
This project publishes what it gets wrong, in a record anyone can read: what a reader would have seen, when it started, when it was noticed, and how long it took to fix. The last two are the ones that say whether a project is careful, so an entry cannot look tidy by leaving them out.
The record is currently empty, and that is not a claim that no mistakes have been made. This site treats an empty correction record as an open question rather than a clean one, because a record can be empty when nobody is checking, and the same reading applies here. Read the record.
Nothing matches that.
