How is Bighound funded?
Bighound is free. There’s no subscription, no tier, and no feature held back for paying members.
Where the money goes
Section titled “Where the money goes”Running it costs real but small money: a server, domains, and access to the breach corpus we check against. Voluntary donations from members cover it.
What donations do not buy
Section titled “What donations do not buy”Nothing. There’s no supporter tier, no priority queue, no extra coverage. A member who donates and a member who never does get an identical product.
That’s deliberate. The moment removals depend on payment, we’re in the same business as the services we warn people about — and the argument that we’re different stops being true.
Why not just charge?
Section titled “Why not just charge?”Charging would fund it more reliably. It would also change what Bighound is: a paid removal service has to keep proving its worth, which creates pressure to inflate the numbers on your dashboard. That pressure is visible across this industry — “188 more sites you may be on” is what it looks like.
Free and small means the dashboard can just tell you the truth, including when the truth is “nothing changed this month.”
Transparency
Section titled “Transparency”Costs are modest and we’d rather say what they are than imply a budget we don’t have. If donations ever exceed running costs, that’ll be said plainly here rather than quietly absorbed.