How We Make Money
An Excerpt from our FAQs Section
This is a question we get every once in a while, and since I already wrote it for the front page FAQs section, I thought I might as well post it here.
Is Laminar Collective Free?
Laminar Collective research, in 2025, will be free for consumers.
We started off with a Mass Save Community Education grant, and transparently, we are charging contractors who participate in the bulk deal somewhere around 3% of installation volume to fund our research and organizing.
To ensure you're actually getting a good deal and we're not just taking the highest bidder, we publish our benchmarks publicly. That's why our benchmarks are open.
Have you considered other funding sources?
Yeah, we have. But we spent half of 2024 concluding that the flat fee is the best way to fund operations for now.
Here are all the other funding sources we considered:
Asking for Donations: I’d rather not spend half of my emails asking you for money. If you believe in what we’re doing, tell your friends about the bulk deals.
MassCEC: we're not really commercializing R&D technology from labs, so the Catalyst grant doesn't apply for us. We tried applying for Empower, but were too early in the process; in any case, that grant is focused on outreach to low/moderate income communities, which we legally can't do anything about because the entire process is handled by regional CAP agencies. Like, the only thing we can do is tell people to go visit the CAP agencies in person.
Community First Partnerships: same problem as Empower. Though we play the role of an energy advocate in some towns, the fact that low-income is completely off limits to us means that we can't leverage any of our negotiating abilities to help. The CFP partnership is supposed to help with uptake of electrification in working class communities, so we don't think we're a great fit there.
Mass Save/National Grid/Eversource: we already have the Community Education Grant, and we are thankful for that. However, that's limited to $25k and the bigger opportunity is Empower. There is no significant grant opportunity that can support a multi-city operation, and the utilities would take years to actually sign a deal. We need to move faster than that.
Foundations: we need to be a 501(c)3 nonprofit, which we could convert to (we are currently a public benefit corporation), but they don't really fund nonprofits that serve market rate customers. Again, because the CAP agencies already have their own thing going on, and nobody else can really touch the process, we can't do that work. I'm not going to go nonprofit just to spend $100k telling people to drive to their local CAP agency.
Cities & Municipalities: cannot strike bulk deals without a public request-for-proposal process, under Chapter 30B of Massachusetts procurement law. I agree with this stance, and I understand why it's essential for the public trust. Private funding allows us to operate outside of that.
Maybe we'll think of another way to fund operations in the future, but for now - that flat percentage is the simplest, and easiest way, to sustain operations.