TopIzdaTo is registered as a public organization in Ukraine — a nonprofit form — rather than as a company. People ask why, usually with the reasonable assumption that it is a tax or grant decision. It is neither.

The incentive question

This is about incentive structure, not about good and bad companies. Commercial intermediaries build genuinely useful things, and plenty of them treat participants well.

But consider what an intermediary's return depends on. It stands between people who can do data work and organizations that need it done, and its margin is the difference between the two sides. Every structural improvement that connects those sides more directly reduces the reason it is needed.

That is arithmetic rather than a moral failing. It simply means the incentive points away from the one thing open infrastructure has to do: make itself less necessary as a gatekeeper while remaining useful as a foundation.

What infrastructure requires

The parts of this that matter most are unglamorous and long-lived:

  • qualification that means the same thing for everyone;
  • terms stated in writing before work begins, not after;
  • a durable record of who contributed what;
  • a network that retains its value when any individual project ends.

None of those produce a return in a quarter. All of them are the reason anyone would trust the system in five years.

What the nonprofit form does and does not do

It does not make us competent. It does not guarantee that we will succeed, and it is not a claim of virtue. Plenty of nonprofits are badly run.

What it does is orient the organization towards one thing rather than another: building open infrastructure, instead of making the two sides permanently dependent on the party in the middle.

It also does not mean everything is free of charge. Operating costs still have to be covered. When TopIzdaTo facilitates a transaction, a 20% administrative allocation covers the administrative and operating expenses of the organization — infrastructure, hosting, the domain, software, administration, coordination, legal and compliance work. The remaining amount is handled according to the terms of that specific transaction. The public explanation is on the transparency page.

What this means for participants

The practical question is not whether nonprofit sounds nicer. It is whether the structure changes what participants can expect.

We want the basic rules to be visible: what participation means, what happens after applying, what is known before work starts, and how the organization funds its operation. The last of those is published on the transparency page, and the first three are on the careers page.

What follows from it

Two practical consequences, both visible on this site.

First, we can afford to be accurate about the current state of things. There is no marketplace running, no dataset catalogue, no backlog of paid projects. Saying that plainly would be commercially awkward and is simply correct.

Second, the rules can be published rather than negotiated case by case behind a sales process. As programmes take shape, the terms that apply to them will be written down and given to participants before they commit to anything.

The organization's registration details are on the legal page, the reasoning behind the whole model is on the mission page, and the operating economics are on the transparency page.