CommunATI sits on a three-legged stool: a parent-company subsidy from Bay Tech Ltd., low-floor subscriptions from member organizations, and annual sponsorships. No grant addiction, no transaction cut, no equity round. The numbers are small on purpose — this is infrastructure, not a venture-scale platform.
A platform that disappears the moment its funder loses interest is worse than no platform at all. CommunATI is built around three revenue legs so no single source can dictate priorities, and so the directory keeps running even if one leg has a bad year.
Bay Tech Ltd. is the parent company. It's a profitable retail and wireless operator in Manitoba, and CommunATI is one of its initiatives. Bay Tech covers the staffing baseline and operational deficit for the first three years. After year three, the goal is that legs 2 and 3 cover operations and the subsidy becomes optional.
Reported as: "operational subsidy from parent company".
STEM organizations that want the toolkit (analytics, logo upload, calendar publishing, equipment-share, listing priority) pay a monthly subscription — placeholder tiers $29 / $59 / $129 CAD per month. Indigenous-led STEM and First Nations / Métis education authorities are permanently exempt. School divisions get a separate annual rate.
Reported as: "earned subscription revenue, member orgs".
Founding ($1K) · Network ($2.5K) · Anchor ($10K) — three tiers, annual, no revenue share, no equity, no strings. Sponsor dollars specifically fund the free family-side directory, the Indigenous-led STEM exemption, and the unglamorous infrastructure (geocoding, hosting, .ics, accessibility audits, French translation).
Reported as: "earned sponsorship revenue".
Expense categories below are the load-bearing ones — they appear in every year's financial summary. The numbers will shift year-to-year; the categories shouldn't.
Hosting (Netlify, Supabase, Apple Developer, domain), geocoding fees (Nominatim is free but rate-limited; commercial fallback when needed), email delivery, push notifications, monitoring, backups. Roughly 15–20% of expense.
Part-time platform maintenance, content review, member-org support, French translation, accessibility audits. Roughly 55–65% of expense. We do not pay marketing salaries — the platform grows by being useful, not by being advertised.
The dollar value of subscription waivers granted to Indigenous-led STEM and small / brand-new programs that can't afford the $29 floor. Tracked as a separate line so sponsors can see exactly how their dollars convert into free seats. Roughly 15–20% of expense.
Operating reserve target: three months of fixed cost. Any year-end surplus that pushes us above the reserve target is returned as a member-org subscription rebate or rolled into next-year free-access subsidy — never distributed as a Bay Tech dividend from CommunATI revenues.
Being clear about what CommunATI doesn't do is as important as the revenue model itself. The list is short, conservative, and the same one we ask sponsors to sign off on.
Bay Tech Ltd. is audited annually. After the audit is filed, a one-page financial summary for CommunATI is posted here — revenue by leg, expense by category, free-access subsidy dollar value, sponsor count, and member-org count. The first summary will cover fiscal 2026 (calendar year 2026, posted in early 2027).
Launch year. The summary will be posted in Q1 2027 after Bay Tech's annual audit. Watch this space; we will not send a separate announcement.
CommunATI did not operate in FY2025 (pre-launch). Bay Tech Ltd.'s own audited financials are available on request for any sponsor or funder doing due diligence.
No. CommunATI is operated as an initiative of Bay Tech Ltd. — a Manitoba private corporation. We are deliberately structured as a low-margin commercial operation so the platform stays independent of any single funder.
Indigenous-led organizations and First Nations / Métis education authorities are permanently exempt from the subscription tiers. That's a line in the budget, not a launch promotion. Sponsor revenue is what makes the exemption sustainable. The Indigenous-led STEM page has the full statement.
No. There is no transaction take, no marketplace fee, no revenue share, and no fund-flow cut. If a funder routes through CommunATI to a partner org, 100 percent of those dollars pass through.
The three-leg structure exists for exactly that reason. Member-org subscriptions and sponsorships are the resilient legs — if Bay Tech's subsidy needs to scale back, operations are funded by legs 2 and 3. We will reduce scope (slower feature work, longer review queues) before reducing access.
Generally no. Sponsorship tiers are unrestricted operating support. Project-specific grants (translation, accessibility audit, Indigenous partnership coordinator role) can be earmarked — write us if you want to fund a bounded build-out rather than general operations.
Right here. After Bay Tech's audited financials are filed, the one-page summary for the fiscal year is published on this page. Sponsors and member orgs also receive a copy by email — no separate sign-up needed.
If you're a STEM org, see how the membership tiers work. If you're a business or foundation, the sponsor program has the three tiers. Anything else, just write us.
View sponsor tiers Contact us