[franga2000]

Reading this comment, I assumed PACER was a private provider who sells access to otherwise freely available material which originally might be scattered and unorganised as government things usually are. Charging for access would therefore be reasonable.

But a quick search reveals that this is in fact a government-provided service. So your government charges you 10 cents per page to download PDFs from a glorified file server.

The US has around 1.5M people working in the legal field. Let's say each of them does 10 document lookups every day. 15 million requests in an 8 hour workday comes out to 500 requests per second. Don't quote me on this, but I'm pretty sure a modern workstation could handle that, let alone a dedicated server or ever a few of them with good caching and client-side load balancing. SCOTUS spends 16M yearly just on building maintenance, I think it's safe to assume they can afford a handful of servers without having to resort to microtransactions...

[manquer]

Going down the cost rabbit hole is problematic, the costs are not just for the service infra. Even for the service you need project managers , product owners, devs, SREs, QAs and data entry operators who collate or atleast update the DB . Easily costs that can run in millions/year.

Typically such revenue streams cover other holes in the budget not related to this service as well, and there is indirect overhead costs like Contracts, control structures, HR, vendors etc harder to amortize.

Any costs for what should be free public access in not right. The argument should be that we pay already tax, this information public should have free and easily .

[franga2000]

I generally agree and my estimates were of course the bare minumum, but the "we already pay tax" argument doesn't really work since, well, this service clearly isn't tax-funded given the fact that it isn't free. It might be tax-subsidised, which often makes sense for things that are very expensive and have limited usefulness to individual citizens (like many services governments render to businesses are). If we consider accessing court records to be something with very limited usefulness to most people and primarily used by companies to make money (which I do, despite having done it myself on a few occasions), how expensive it actually is to run becomes very important when convincing "the people" to fund it 100%.