Institutions and donors fund the system. End users access free at the base. Verifiers anywhere in the world can check a PLENA receipt without paying, without an account, and without permission. This page answers the natural question that follows: if the people who need PLENA most pay nothing, where does the money come from.
PLENA's funding doctrine has four lanes. The first is free for everyone. The other three are paid by the institutions that benefit most from what those services produce.
Anyone can take a PLENA receipt and check it. Recipients, regulators, courts, employers, journalists, family members, future selves. No account. No paywall. No region lock. Verification is the part of the system that has to be free, because a receipt that costs money to read is not a receipt — it is a subscription.
Institutions pay to create receipts at scale. Issuer-in-a-box, the Command Center dashboard, the embeddable badge widget, the verified organization registry profile, white-label intake portals, API access when the production backend is scoped. The buyers are universities, NGOs, dioceses, legal aid clinics, banks, publishers, ID offices, and public agencies.
Institutions pay for PlenaProof Academy training: Staff Certification, Certified Reviewer, Records Officer, AI Oversight Reviewer, plus annual renewal. The training is what makes the receipts defensible in real workflows, and the people earning the certifications are the institutional employees who will sign their names to decisions.
Institutions pay for the issuing pathway end to end: audit-ready exports, board and funder packets, procurement-pack documents, sector-specific suites (universities, churches, NGOs, legal aid, finance, publishers, employers, government central services, autonomous mobility, aviation, ride-hailing, tourism), and registry-backed confirmation services.
The phrase already appears on the homepage as a banner. This page is its full explanation: what is open, what is paid, who pays it, and why the split is drawn where it is.
The same receipt can be created by an institution, carried by an individual, and verified by a third party. Only one of those three pays.
| Who | What they do | What they pay |
|---|---|---|
| Individual using PlenaProof from a phone or browser | Reads, navigates, prepares an application, builds a submission receipt on this device, downloads a free explainer, opens a Wallet on the same device. | Free at the base. No account required for most public pages. No advertising on the free pages. |
| Verifier anywhere in the world | Pastes a receipt, scans a QR, opens a public verification page, checks status, inspects bounded metadata. | Free. Verification has to be free or it is not verification. |
| Institution using PlenaProof for staff workflows | Issues receipts at scale, runs Command Center, registers an organization profile, embeds a badge, runs a sector suite, requests a pilot, scopes API access. | Paid. Pricing tiers are public. Founding pilots are available. |
| Trained staff at an institution | Earns Staff Certification, Certified Reviewer, Records Officer, or AI Oversight Reviewer credentials. Renews annually. | Paid. Usually by the institution that employs them. |
| Donors and foundations | Fund the open verification surface, the language integrity work, the public-receipt log, the open VRX-1 specification, and the hundred-year operating commitment. | Invited. Pilot conversations include donor and grant pathways. |
| Public-agency partners | Use the National Identity Service Continuity Desk modules, sector AI trust suites, or government central-services pathways inside their own internal workflows. | Paid as institutional contracts. See Government suite. |
A funding model is partly about how the money arrives and partly about how it does not. These are the lines PlenaProof does not cross to make the open base sustainable.
Funding models reveal what the system actually believes about the people inside it. Three reasons PLENA draws the line at Open Verify and Paid Create.
An asylum applicant preparing a credential file, a tenant facing eviction, a refugee waiting for an ID-service appointment, a researcher whose authorship is at stake — these are the cases PlenaProof exists for. A receipt that costs $4.99 to create rules these cases out, which means the system fails the very people whose problem it is trying to address.
Universities, NGOs, ID offices, legal aid clinics, banks, and publishers already pay for compliance software, audit tools, document management, and credentialing services. PLENA fits inside that existing budget line. Charging the institution and not the user matches who has the resources and who carries the accountability.
A receipt that costs money to read is a paywall, not a proof. If the verifier has to pay or log in or accept terms before seeing whether a receipt is valid, the receipt has lost the property that distinguishes it from a marketing claim. Open Verify is not generosity — it is the part of the design that makes the rest of the design work.
This page answers who pays. The Institutional Pricing page answers how much, with founding-pilot, small-institution, professional-institution, and enterprise/API tiers, plus bundle-specific buyer logic and add-ons. The Institutional Pilot page is where a real conversation starts. The Trust Center explains what PlenaProof does and does not promise. The Procurement Pack gives legal, IT, privacy, and compliance reviewers the short documents they expect before pilot approval.