What you pay follows what you can carry
Pricing is set by ability to pay, measured against revenue or operating budget rather than per seat. Schools in need pay what a run costs LoQuery and nothing on top.
Ability to pay sets the price
| Organisation | What it pays |
|---|---|
| Schools and educational institutions in need Public schools, under-resourced boards, and programmes with no budget line for this. | At cost. No profit. |
| Better-resourced schools, colleges and universities Identical software. The price rises with resources, up to close to the commercial rate. | Toward the commercial rate |
| Mission-driven organisations Non-profits, charities, public-interest research and journalism. | Scaled to operating budget |
| Commercial research and analysis Firms, consultancies, and anyone billing a client for the work. | Commercial rate |
The scale runs in both directions. Institutions that can pay close to the commercial rate pay close to it, at a profit, and that margin is what sustains the at-cost floor for schools that cannot.
Why the price can be low
Today, searches run in your browser through the LoQuery extension, and LoQuery buys no search API. The extension is how individuals and smaller organisations run LoQuery at the lowest cost; for larger commercial clients we also offer managed server-side deployments. The reasoning runs on gpt-oss-120b, OpenAI's open-weight model, served by Groq and Cerebras, at a fraction of frontier-model token prices. A run costs cents; a typical session stays under a dollar at today's list prices. There is no per-seat licence: a class of thirty pays for the runs those thirty students make. How it works covers the architecture behind this.
Compute, and a margin on it above the floor, is LoQuery's only revenue. There is no ad surface and no engagement target.
Runs are billed per run, not per month
There is no monthly plan here, so there is no allowance to spend down and no query limit to reach. A LoQuery run is billed as a run, in cents, so the ceiling is whatever you decide to spend. A month you do not use costs nothing.
Where the model stands
LoQuery is a company incorporated in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada, and describes itself as a social enterprise. The education commitment is company policy, published here. Exact pricing bands are still being finalised; write to support@loquery.com if you need a number today.