name: Open States API FinOps
description: >
  Open States is a volunteer-powered civic technology project operated under
  Plural Policy. The API is provided free of charge across all tiers. There are
  no per-request fees or subscription costs. Financial sustainability relies on
  donations, grants, and the Plural Policy commercial platform. FinOps
  considerations focus on quota management rather than cost control.
url: https://pluralpolicy.com/open
pricing:
  model: free
  currency: USD
  perRequestCost: 0
  monthlySubscriptionCost: 0
  notes: >
    No monetary cost is associated with any API tier. Organizations requiring
    high-volume access should contact contact@openstates.org. Bulk data
    downloads are available as an alternative to high-frequency API calls.
costOptimization:
  - strategy: Use bulk downloads for large dataset needs
    description: >
      For ingesting large volumes of legislative data, bulk downloads are
      more efficient than repeated API calls and do not count against rate limits.
    url: https://docs.openstates.org/
  - strategy: Cache API responses locally
    description: >
      Legislative data changes infrequently. Caching responses for bills,
      jurisdictions, and committee data reduces redundant API calls.
  - strategy: Request quota upgrade proactively
    description: >
      If approaching daily limits, request a tier upgrade from the Open States
      team before hitting rate limit errors rather than after.
    contact: contact@openstates.org
  - strategy: Use pagination and field filtering
    description: >
      The v3 API supports field inclusion/exclusion parameters. Requesting
      only needed fields reduces payload size and processing overhead.
sustainability:
  donationUrl: https://openstates.org/about/
  parentOrganization: Plural Policy
  parentUrl: https://pluralpolicy.com/
  notes: >
    Open States encourages users who derive value from the platform to
    contribute financially or via code contributions to the open-source
    scrapers and data pipelines.