What it costs to build this properly
The Ask
The neighborhood never pays and participation stays free.
The roster
~136,000 lines across eight surfaces, six app entrypoints, 65 files carrying shader code.
Where these salaries come from
- Computational geometry SWE — avg ~$180k, quartiles ~$149k–$222k
- Computer graphics / shader engineer — avg ~$162k, quartiles ~$140k–$173k
- Technical artist — avg ~$71k, typical ~$65k–$77k
- Senior SWE, St. Louis — ~$135k–$173k; general SWE ~$95k–$138k
- Nonprofit ED — St. Louis avg ~$111k; $45k–$70k under $1M revenue
- Market spread — NYC ~$200k–$290k · SF Bay ~$149k–$236k · Chicago ~$155k–$220k · Denver ~$150k–$215k · Austin ~$160k–$230k · St. Louis ~$100k
Revenue assumptions
Retail · services · tickets · events · memberships
The courier is paid 75% of it. ▶ The Split
Retail, services, tickets, events. Nothing is built for this yet, and it has no service charge to sit inside.
Runs the neighborhood — local moderation, trust & safety, the merchant relationships. Supported by what that Ward earns, not by the central studio.
Commissioned work
Pouring and looking after a ward is commissioned, not staffed.
On top of salary
The reading · one year
Cost of the roster
- Headcount
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- Salaries
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- Payroll tax & benefits
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- Incremental overhead only
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- Pour commissions
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- Ward upkeep
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Earned by the studio
- Neighborhoods poured
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- Support on the installed base
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- The Ward’s share of food orders
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- Fee on other local commerce
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- Earned total
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Earned by the Local Hosts
- Salaries, all wards
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- Local Host share
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- Each Local Host
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What must be raised
- Cost, less what the unit earns
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- Fiscal sponsor fee
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- Underwritten, per year
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- The budget line
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Net, against neighborhoods
What we take, and what we don’t
Nobody pays to be on it. Revenue comes from transactions and services that happen through the platform, so it follows how much a neighborhood sells — not how much anyone is charged for access.
A townie has checked in on three distinct days in a rolling fourteen, in the neighborhood, server-side; every delivery resolves to a building inside the boundary. Participation is structural, not acquired.
- 10.5% of food sold, after the courier is paid — and the neighborhood’s own Local Host is paid out of that before the studio keeps any of it. Processing is passed through at cost and is never marked up — what is charged is what is paid — and nothing is charged to a merchant to participate.
- New capabilities enter an existing Ward, not a new market. Retail, services, tickets and events are in-boundary by construction; they do not require a separate population to be acquired.
- The unit is a bounded economy with verified-by-presence participants. To a payments institution 10.5% understates it: behind the flow sit merchant relationships, deposits, payments, payouts, and participation in a locally verified economy.
The engineering footprint
Eight distinct surfaces across five engineering disciplines. Counted from the repository, excluding dependencies, archives and scratch.
| Surface | Scale | What it is | Who owns it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pour engine | ~30k | Skeleton, derive, ribbons, tileGround at 8,184 lines alone. Polygon partitioning, offsetting, corner solving | Computational geometry |
| Player / runtime | ~20k | Scene, slab rendering, street view, camera, post-processing — plus 65 files carrying GLSL | Real-time 3D & shaders |
| Tree & asset pipeline | ~32k | Species, atlases, impostors, GLB processing, the salon | Technical artist / pipeline |
| Authoring portal | ~19k | Extent, Surveyor, the stores behind them — the operator's tools | Tools front-end |
| The Ward app | ~15k | Place cards (4,478 lines in one file), roles, bulletin, QR, menus | Product front-end |
| Backend — social | 2.6k | Apps Script over Sheets, ~54 actions. Holds identity and guardianship | Backend; and it needs migrating |
| Backend — commerce | ~3k | Supabase, Postgres, RLS, Stripe, Twilio, dispatch, edge functions | Platform; payments and PII |
| Bake & deploy | ~6k | Slab bake, R2 offload, the worker, release | Build & release |
What is true today
Built and standing
- ~136,000 lines across eight surfaces, six app entrypoints
- Lafayette Square fully installed — 1,729 buildings with facades, years, architects, historic status
- A second under way at Hi-Pointe / DeMun
- Live at lafayette-square.com; handbook and seven role guides at theward.online
- Couriers, dispatch, live map, phone verification — running
- Commerce built: item identity, price of record, 86, the guardian write path, the order contract
Not yet true
- Pre-revenue — commercial operation has not begun
- The commerce layer is written but has never run — four deploy steps outstanding
- Two legal items remain open
- Insurance unpriced, and a condition of switching delivery on
- The entity split — infrastructure vs. operator — undecided
- No fiscal sponsor chosen; no board recruited
- Identity and guardianship live in a spreadsheet. It works, and it is not where they should stay
What the roster means
- A studio at full strength is a seven-figure annual budget — a different class of funder than a first community grant
- Absorption changes the staffing equation: an established organisation may already employ these five disciplines.
- Custodial staffing keeps it alive and pours towns. It does not develop the product
- Assembling this team from grants alone is a multi-year fundraising project before a line is written
- The existing Platform reduces what has to be built. It does not eliminate the people required to operate and extend it.