For nonprofits

Polaris for nonprofits

Your org chart is six staff and forty people who help. Per-seat pricing was designed for the opposite shape.

The short answer

Nonprofits usually have a small paid staff surrounded by many occasional participants: volunteers, trustees, part-time coordinators and partner organisations. Per-seat software charges for all of them. Polaris has no seat count and no tier, so unlimited people share one free workspace with tasks, docs and team chat, and the only cost is roughly two dollars per human-hour an AI worker delivers.

Cost per volunteer: $0
People in one workspace: Unlimited
Billed when nothing is delivered: $0

The seat tax on the shape you actually are

Per-seat pricing assumes an organisation is a set of full-time employees who all use the software daily. A nonprofit is rarely that. It is four or six paid staff, a board that shows up quarterly, a rota of volunteers who need access for one campaign, a partner organisation running a joint programme, and a part-time bookkeeper. Every one of those people costs the same per month as a full-time employee in most tools.

So the standard workaround is a shared login, or a spreadsheet, or keeping volunteers permanently outside the system and forwarding them things. All three cost more in coordination than the licence would have, and the last one is why volunteer effort so often gets wasted on work that was already done.

A six-staff, forty-volunteer organisation

On per-seat tools

Every occasional helper is a full monthly licence
Volunteers get excluded to control cost, then work in the dark
A second tool for docs doubles the count
Adding AI means another per-person add-on on top

On Polaris

All forty-six people in one workspace at no cost
Tasks, docs and team chat included, with no tier to outgrow
A volunteer sees the workstream they are helping with, and its history
The only spend is work an AI worker actually delivered

The work most worth handing to a worker

Jobs that are essential, repetitive and chronically underserved in a small organisation.

Funder and grant research
The scan of who is funding what, with deadlines and eligibility, which everyone knows should be continuous and is instead done in a panic. A research analyst runs live web search and returns sourced findings as a file.
Report drafting
Funder reports, impact summaries and the board pack. First drafts assembled from the workstream, then edited by the person who actually knows the programme.
Process documentation
The volunteer handbook, the event runbook, the induction notes. Written once, versioned, and no longer resident in the head of the coordinator who left in June.
Budget and spend reporting
The recurring finance summary that a part-time bookkeeper produces at the end of a long week, drafted in advance for them to correct.

What to try first, concretely

Take one programme, put it in a workstream, and add the volunteers who work on it. That alone tests the thing per-seat pricing has been preventing: whether occasional helpers do better work when they can see the whole picture rather than receiving forwarded fragments.

Then assign one funder research task to a worker and read what comes back. It costs roughly two dollars per human-equivalent hour of the work delivered, itemised on a log you can challenge, which is a defensible line in a budget in a way that a monthly licence for forty part-time people is not.

Next, for a nonprofit

The pricing argument in full, the roles worth hiring, and the reporting work.

Per-seat pricing and usage pricing charge for different things

One model prices access. The other prices output. Almost every argument about software cost is really about which of those you are buying.

Hire an AI research analyst

Assign the question on Tuesday afternoon and read the brief before your Wednesday call, with every claim carrying the URL it came from.

Hire an AI content writer

Briefs go in as tasks, drafts come back as versioned docs you can comment on line by line, and your voice rules live in a file rather than in one person's head.

Budget reports written for the people who did the spending

Plan against actuals is easy to produce and hard to read. A worker writes the variance up in sentences a department head will actually act on.

Getting a process out of one person's head

The process exists. It is in someone's habits and in six months of Slack threads. A worker interviews and reads until it is on a page.

Questions people ask

+Is there a nonprofit discount?

There is no discount because there is no price on the software. It is free with no seat count and no tier, for any organisation of any size, and that is not a charitable programme that could be withdrawn. Revenue comes only from delivered AI work at roughly two dollars per human-equivalent hour.

+How is free sustainable? We have been burned by tools that changed pricing.

It is a fair question and the honest answer is the revenue mechanism, not a promise. Polaris makes money when AI workers deliver work, so the free workspace is the thing that makes the metered part possible rather than a loss leader waiting to be closed. That said, Polaris is an early-stage product in public beta, and no early-stage product can guarantee its own future. Keep your data exportable and judge accordingly.

+Can volunteers use it without training?

Sign-in is passwordless, an emailed code with no password anywhere in the product, which removes the single largest source of volunteer support requests. The interface is tasks, docs and chat, and there is a mobile app with voice input live as an installable PWA. Nobody needs a terminal or a local setup.

+What about our compliance requirements around processing?

Treat this as a real constraint rather than a formality. Connections are authorised once at organisation level with credentials stored server-side, and the product is in public beta. If you operate under a data protection agreement, a funder condition or a safeguarding policy that governs where records may be processed, run this through that process before any personal data goes in, and start with a workstream that has none.

+We are two paid staff and a lot of goodwill. Is this too much tool?

Possibly, for the workspace. Two people can coordinate in a shared document for a long time. The part that is not too much tool is the worker: funder research and report drafting are jobs a two-person organisation genuinely cannot do properly, and that is worth testing on its own before you move any coordination at all.

Polaris for small business

The jobs that never get done in a small business are not hard. There is simply nobody free to do them.