[mCOLlSVIxp6c]

Have you considered allowing people to "donate" their PACER accounts up to the free limit so that CourtListener could download documents directly without relying on a RECAP or API user to do it? With enough free accounts you might be able to start downloading every document in every case.

[mlissner]

We're thinking about that, actually! There are a couple hard parts though:

1. How do you know which documents to buy with the donated credits?

2. How do you get access to the user's account? Do you store their password somewhere?

Maybe a simple trick would be to throw a little alert with the extension around the end of the quarter just to say, "Hey, it's the end of the quarter. Have you spent your entire free budget?"

Hm. There's an opportunity here, but we've never quite nailed it down.

[toomuchtodo]

1. Whatever docs your org feels have the highest value at that time.

2. The user provides their creds and you store them in Hashicorp Vault, AWS Param Store, or another secrets manager, and then retrieve them for use in making requests with a queue and runner mechanism.

If you have questions about this, email in profile. Last job was somewhere making requests for users with their creds at scale, currently in infosec. I would love to help make all PACER docs freely available.

[Mathnerd314]

I would say the easiest thing is make a web page that downloads documents from highly-viewed dockets, prioritizing opinions and other interesting entries using the API. The UI is something that just prompts for username/password/budget and then shows a list of the fetched documents.

Then if it's popular you can do more interesting things like prompting people to use the web page from the extension, moving the whole web page and fetch logic into the extension so it doesn't leak credentials, turning it into a cryptocurrency so people can fetch documents on demand, etc., but first things first.