Prove
Before you sign anything, we build a working prototype on your members' own data — the real filings or submissions, not sample rows. You see actual organizations, actual cohorts, actual numbers, and you can put it in front of two or three members and watch what they do with it. This costs you a dataset and a few conversations, and it is the fastest way to find out whether the data supports a product worth having. If it does not, we would rather both know at this point.
License
If the prototype holds up, we move to a multi-year license with maintenance, hosting, and ongoing development included. The agreement fixes the base platform, the division of ownership, the continuity protections, and renewal terms up front. We handle infrastructure, monitoring, and the data pipelines; you handle branding, configuration, and the decisions about what your members see. Implementation is measured in weeks, because the platform already exists — the work is integration and configuration, not invention.
Embed
The platform goes to your members as part of membership, under your name and through your channels. We integrate with your authentication so members use credentials they already have, and we work with your staff on the announcement, the onboarding path, and the support handoff. From a member's point of view, the association built them something useful. That is the correct impression, and it is the one that shows up in retention conversations.
Extend
Once the base platform is in steady use, optional premium modules can be offered to members who want to go deeper — always with your written approval, always alongside a share of revenue back to your organization, and never by removing something members already had. Where the platform needs to do something your industry requires and it does not yet do, that work is scoped as a fixed-fee phase and built into the platform. In parallel, improvements we build for any association on the platform arrive in yours. The product you license in year one is not the product you have in year three.
Ownership and continuity.
You are licensing a platform rather than commissioning a build, and the agreement should say plainly what that means on both sides. Here is the division, and what protects you if we are no longer here.
Your organization owns
- Your branding, domain, and configuration
- Your data, exportable in standard formats at any time
- Your member relationships and communications
- Approval rights over anything offered to your members
UpTahr owns and operates
- The platform source code
- Hosting, monitoring, and maintenance
- The data pipelines and the benchmarking engine
- Ongoing development across the platform
- Your data is isolated
- Each association runs as an isolated tenant. Your members' data, your configuration and your engagement records are reachable only from your instance. No other association on the platform — in your industry or any other — can see them, and no dataset from another industry appears in yours. Where a cross-industry comparison would genuinely serve your members, it requires written agreement from both organizations and is never enabled by default.
- Source code escrow
- The platform source is deposited with a third-party escrow agent and kept current. Release is triggered by defined events — most importantly, UpTahr ceasing operations or failing to meet its support obligations under the agreement.
- Data export in standard formats
- Your ingested data, your configuration, and your member-facing outputs are exportable at any time during the term, without a request to us and without a fee. Exports are CSV and JSON with documented schemas, plus the generated PDFs. Nothing is held in a format only we can read.
- Perpetual fallback license
- If UpTahr ceases operations, the license converts to a perpetual, irrevocable right to run the platform for your own members, using the escrowed source. You can operate it yourself or appoint another vendor to operate it for you. Your members' access does not depend on our continued existence.
- What happens at renewal
- The license runs for a fixed multi-year term. At the end of it you can renew, or you can leave — and if you leave, you take a full export with you and we support a defined wind-down period so members are not cut off mid-cycle.
Is this your organization?
- Your members already generate or submit a standardized dataset — regulatory filings, claims, safety reports, industry surveys.
- Member retention and demonstrable member value matter as much to your organization as revenue.
- You do not have an internal engineering team, and building one is not the right use of budget.
- You already have a way to reach and authenticate your members.
If most of these are true, this pattern probably works for you. If none are, it probably does not.