Why $65?

So you’ve collected all the information for your Sourcery request, you’ve filled out the necessary fields, and you’re ready to hit “submit” and get your documents. Now it’s time to pay the bill: $65.

Why $65? Well, the Sourcery Team spent the summer of 2025 running the app through its paces ahead of our September launch in the pilot-launch cities of Boston and New York City. We wanted to make sure it worked, yes, but we also wanted data on how long it takes a Sourcerer to access various repositories, how long different requests take to complete, what our Sourcerers would consider a fair wage, and how much the average researcher would be able to pay.

We learned a lot! 

Our beta testing revealed that folder-level requests consistently take between 75 and 90 minutes to complete onsite, and that price expectations on the part of both Sourcerers and researchers hovered around $55-70. Perhaps unsurprisingly this figure approximates the typical wage for a graduate student assistant in a fully-funded humanities Ph.D. program in Boston and New York City (about $25-35 per hour). It also approximately tracks the living wage in those cities–something we’re ethically committed to paying.

We therefore set our pricing based on these estimates: 

• Jobs are estimated at 2 hour completion time
• Sourcerers are paid $58.50 per job ($29.25 per hour)
• Sourcery recovers $6.50 in service costs (including transaction fees, infrastructure costs, customer service, etc.)

The bottom line is $65. That may sound a little pricey, but it ensures everyone is treated fairly, jobs get filled reliably and well, and the Sourcery service can continue to operate. It’s also a whole lot cheaper than a plane ticket or even a regional train trip. (We’ll compare travel costs in a later post.) 
Generous funding from the Mellon Foundation allows us to continue to experiment with pricing and iterate as we aim for that sweet spot between affordability for the researcher and a fair paycheck for the Sourcerer. We’d love to hear any feedback you have for us. Our shared vision is that Sourcery supports and expands researcher access to archival materials, equitably and sustainably.