● SUPPORT · NO PAYWALL · NO ADS
If this is useful, keep it alive.
Bitinforming is one person, one terminal, and a stack of API bills. Every daily digest costs roughly $3 in API calls — Claude for summarization and narration, plus historical price lookups and audio synthesis. The site is free, ad-free, and will stay that way. If a digest saved you research time, or the strategy receipts convinced you of something, the buttons below keep this going.
$3
One digest day
Covers a single morning's API spend — summarization, narration, price fetches, the lot.
$30
One month of compute
Funds an entire month of daily digests. The most common useful contribution.
★ Founder tier
$300
A quarter
90 days of daily intelligence, audio narration, and historical backtests. Buys real runway.
$3,000
A year
365 days of operation. If this site is your daily research tool, this is the honest price.
Why your dollars do real work
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What the money actually pays for
- Claude API — every digest is summarized into plain English and narrated into a 2-minute audio briefing. Largest single line item.
- yfinance / price data — ~50 ticker lookups per day plus 1-year historical bars for the track record build. Free today, but I'm rate-limited and will eventually need a paid feed.
- Firebase Hosting + Firestore — small but real. Subscribers, archive, search index, daily JSON exports.
- Patent + arXiv API calls — the actual signal source. Free APIs today but heavy traffic budgets.
- My time — half-day per week of operator effort to curate the Bench, watch for bugs, and write the editorial brief. Tips here pay for the next round of feature work.
Or just stay on the list — free.
The fastest way to support a small project is to be a returning reader. Get the digest in your inbox each morning. One short email. No tracking pixels. Unsubscribe in one click.
Honest answers
- Is this an investment service?
- No. Bitinforming is editorial research, not financial advice. The strategy page is a paper portfolio — hypothetical, no positions actually held. The track record exists to be honest about whether the signal works (it sometimes does, sometimes doesn't). Anything you read here is information; what you do with your money is your business.
- What do I get for donating?
- Truthfully: gratitude and the warm fuzzy of keeping a one-person project alive. There's no paywall, no premium tier, no gated content. Everything is free for everyone. If/when there's a paid email tier in the future, anyone who's tipped will get a generous discount, but I won't promise specifics I'd have to walk back.
- Why no paywall?
- Paywalls kill compounding audience growth, and I'd rather have 10,000 free readers than 200 paying ones at this stage. Tip jar instead. The economics work if a small fraction of regular readers throw $30 once a year.
- Can I sponsor a digest?
- Once readership is real, yes — a small "this issue brought to you by ___" line at the bottom of the daily brief is a clean way to underwrite a day. Reach out via Twitter if interested.
- Where does the data come from?
- arXiv (computer science + AI listings), Google Patents (newly published applications), Google Trends (search-volume context), and yfinance (price history). The transformations from raw feeds → tickers → impact scores → strategy picks are all defined in code that's open-ish — I'll publish the repo publicly once a few security issues are scrubbed.
- Does the strategy beat the market?
- Right now, no — at the time of writing, the 5-day-hold strategy is ~5.5 points behind SPY in the live window. The underlying signal does generate small positive alpha at the 5-day horizon when measured across all 397 historical calls (+1.05%), but the concentrated single-pick strategy hasn't captured it yet. The full numbers are here.