Economic model
One rule holds everywhere: free to connect, paid to prove. What qualifies a file is never charged. What gets charged is the proof produced on a real transaction.
What we do not charge for
These tools exist to qualify a file before it even exists. Charging for them would mean charging admission to a market we are trying to open up.
Price index
Documented sale results, line by line, each with its source dispatch and the stated sampling bias.
Export Check
The documents required, their mandated order and their validity periods, by species and by country pair.
Market calendar
Auctions, championships, breeding, moulting, hunting season and administrative deadlines worth tracking.
Knowledge centre
CITES, falcon passports, identification by ring, chip and DNA, cabin transport. Every page cites its sources.
Messaging between parties
Tracked, timestamped exchanges between a breeder and a buyer, with no commission on the introduction.
What we charge for
The main revenue line is documentary verification on a transaction, taken as a deliberately low percentage of the declared value.
A minimum amount per file
On a small transaction, a low percentage does not even cover processing cost. The floor exists so the automated layer stays systematic, including on modest files, whose marginal cost is close to zero but never quite zero.
A rate that falls as the value rises
Verifying a file does not take twice the work when the bird's price doubles. Same documents, same checks, same firm. A flat rate would charge the same service twice over for a higher price, and that does not hold up.
A maximum amount per file
Without a cap, the highest-value transactions would pay the most for an identical file. Those are exactly the buyers with the means to bypass the platform, and they would. The cap is not generosity: it is what keeps the model alive.
Automated verification alone
Run on every file opened. Legibility, completeness, dates, consistency across documents, a search for the permit number in the public CITES register. The result is countersigned by the person who filed it, who stays responsible for what they declared.
Automated, plus review by a law firm
Triggered above a declared-value threshold. The firm confirms the documents with the issuing authority and delivers its own work to the client, on its own letterhead and under its own liability. The price shown separates the platform's share from the firm's share.
Secondary revenue
What is still open, and why
The amounts are not set, and we will publish none until they are. This is not a commercial holdback, it is a factual dependency: the threshold that triggers level 2 depends on the real cost of a review by a CITES specialist firm, and that figure still has to come from the firms themselves.
Until that cost is known, three things stay open:
- the floor amount per file, which has to cover automated processing without discouraging small transactions;
- the tiers of the declining rate and the cap amount, which follow from processing cost rather than positioning;
- the declared-value threshold above which level 2 becomes automatic, which depends directly on what the firms charge.
Publishing an invented grid would read better, and it would be wrong the moment the first real quote comes in. A rate announced then revised upward costs more in credibility than having no rate at all. We would rather write down what is decided, the structure, and say plainly what is not, the amounts.