No, the product is not self-deployable like on a platform like wix or squarespace. We work closely with partners to understand needs carefully, and then configure the backend to set up your version of the product on a domain of your choice. After that we work with your team for onboarding and training around the use of the product, providing support thereafter for the rest of the year.

The product is designed mobile first, so it works well in the browser, and as a web app offers certain limited offline functionality. Your version of the product would have your branding and be accessible on a domain or subdomain of your choice for example: stories.yourdomain.org.

The product is very scalable, although the price quoted above assumes small to medium sized organisations. For larger organisations the price would change a bit to account for scaled up server requirements.

The responsibility and ownership for the data is completely on the organisation whose platform it is. We do not claim any ownership on the data, or share it with any person, organisation or platform for other uses.

The platform doesn’t have to be open, and can be setup to be accessible only through a login. In fact, based on the login and the user role assigned, different groups of users can have access to restricted features and pages.

Yes! You can directly upload photos and audio through the templates. For videos, given the varying large sizes possible on mobile phones today, we have made provisions for embedding videos from services such as YouTube. Your team member will have to upload the video on YouTube, and then embedding using the link. For use cases where video is critical, we can work on customisations when doing the initial scoping.

In our work over the past few years, we’ve realised that for maximum comfort for field and program teams to write stories, they must be encouraged to do so in the script and language in which they are comfortable. But that leads to a challenge around translation. Over the next two quarters we will be integrating AI translation models to aid reading of stories by teams irrespective of the language they’re in.

The pricing shared above is for one year. In our work with other organisations, we do so through a close collaboration, believing that support is a must. Beyond the first year, partners can choose to continue with an annual contract which would include hosting, support and new features and updates as they get pushed. Some partners might choose to discontinue the annual contract if they feel that they don’t need support, and we can shift the system to be self-hosted. In that case, there would be a small handover cost, and set up so that the organisation pays for Google Cloud and other services directly.

The product is built on the Open Knowledge Framework by Ooloi Labs. The framework is not open source at the moment, but it is in our roadmap to make the project open source next year, and we are in the process of working out the details. Watch our linkedin or subscribe to our newsletter for announcements.