For Profit or Open Source Foundation?

ID Respect – Helping you manage your data online.

I'm launching ID Respect, a company that automates your data privacy requests to companies.

If you're an EU resident, when GDPR goes live (May 25th) you'll be able to request, delete, and edit your data that companies have.

In the US, you can opt-out of marketing from over 50 data mining companies and more corporates.

For both the EU and US, you can do this yourself, but you have to contact every company individually and some require physical mail.

ID Respect automates these submissions, including the paper ones. You choose your location and the companies you interact with, answer a few questions, and we send the requests to companies on your behalf.

Should I:
[Option 1] Charge a fee for this service, maybe $5 per request (not per company)
[Option 2] Make the service free as part of an open foundation and accept donations

Option 1 is the easy choice, as it covers my costs and makes the service profitable. Option 2 is more difficult, as I'm relying on donations, but could create a much larger movement and increase service trust and usage (which is the ultimate goal).

Note: the free service may have some fees too. Under GDPR, companies can charge a "reasonable" fee for data requests, I would pass those fees along to the requester at cost.