A 10-second photo becomes a community-verified, GPS-stamped, legally significant hazard your city is now liable for ignoring.
Americans spend $3 billion a year on pothole damage. Cities ignore problems they're not legally documented as knowing about. We just made that documentation effortless.
Fault Line turns a one-tap photo into a community-verified, GPS-timestamped legal record. When 10 reports cluster, the app auto-emails the responsible authority a professional escalation letter citing the state's specific notice-of-defect statute. Cities can no longer plead ignorance.
The product is fully built — mobile (Expo/RN), web (Next.js 15), Supabase backend, AI photo analysis (Claude), 24 categories, 5 languages, 42 authorities pre-loaded across MA/RI/NH. Operating costs are under $30/month at current scale. Ad-supported with optional donations; ad-free subscription is scaffolded behind a feature flag for activation when stores approve.
We're seeking $50K–$150K in pre-seed grant capital to: (1) fund a year of paid app store presence + Apple Developer fees, (2) cover a 12-month AI inference budget, (3) commission a professional brand identity, and (4) kickstart municipal pilot partnerships in 3 New England states.
The American Society of Civil Engineers gives US infrastructure a C- grade. The Federal Highway Administration estimates a $786 billion deferred maintenance backlog. The 311 system that most cities rely on for citizen reports was launched in 1996 and has not been meaningfully upgraded.
The result: cities literally don't know where the worst problems are. There is no aggregation, no public visibility, no comparative pressure between municipalities, and — critically — no documented notice that creates legal liability. Every state has a "notice of defect" statute that creates liability for unfixed reported hazards, but almost no one uses these statutes because individuals lack the documentation infrastructure to make a notice legally meaningful.
Fault Line is the documentation infrastructure.
Three forces converge in 2026:
This is not a deck for a hypothetical product. The product exists, is fully functional, and is ready to ship to app stores today.
Free for users. Three monetization layers, in order of size and reliability:
| Layer | Mechanism | Revenue Profile |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Banner Ads | Google AdSense (web) + AdMob (mobile) | $1–3 eCPM × 500 DAU × 3 impressions = $45–135/mo at launch; scales linearly |
| 2. Ad-Free Tier | $2.99/mo or $19.99/yr via RevenueCat (mobile) + Stripe (web). Currently scaffolded behind a feature flag. | ~5–10% conversion is industry standard for utility apps. At 1,000 DAU = $150–300/mo |
| 3. Municipal Licensing | Cities pay for white-label dashboards, predictive analytics exports, and custom authority routing | $5K–$25K/year per municipality. The largest opportunity but slowest sales cycle. |
| 4. Donations | Ko-fi and direct giving | Small but signals love; useful for grant applications |
Ko-fi and AdSense break-even at ~300 daily active users. Municipal licensing becomes meaningful at ~10K MAU. The unit economics are favorable from day one because operating costs are fixed and tiny (see Architecture).
SeeClickFix is the closest analog and was acquired by CivicPlus in 2019. It is sold to municipalities as a back-office tool. It does not have legal pressure features, public health grades, AI photo analysis, or the consumer-friendly experience that drives mass adoption.
Open311 is a protocol, not a product. It standardizes how cities ingest reports but does not generate any consumer-facing value.
City-specific apps (Boston 311, NYC 311, etc.) exist but are siloed, lack accountability features, and have no community verification layer.
None of these products have:
Fault Line is positioned as the consumer-friendly accountability layer that complements existing 311 systems rather than replacing them — though for cities without good 311, it can replace them entirely via Open311 integration.
Pre-launch. The product is built. The website is live. Marketing materials are in place. We are awaiting Apple Developer enrollment ($99/yr) and Google Play registration ($25 one-time) to ship to stores.
Michael Wylde · Founder & Engineer
Solo developer, designer, and writer. Built Fault Line from concept to production-ready in [n months]. Operates Moonlit Social Labs, an independent civic-tech studio. Reachable at moonlit-social-labs@proton.me.
The lean structure is a feature, not a bug: it keeps operating costs near zero, keeps decision-making fast, and creates an exceptionally favorable risk/reward for grant capital. Once a product-market fit signal arrives, the team will expand strategically (designer, mobile engineer, partnerships lead).
We are seeking $50K–$150K in non-dilutive grant capital across the next 12 months, distributed roughly as follows:
| Category | Allocation | Rationale |
|---|---|---|
| Apple Developer Program (1 year) | $99 | Required to ship to iOS App Store |
| Google Play Console (one-time) | $25 | Already paid |
| Domain & DNS (1 year) | $120 | fault-line.dev + email routing |
| AI inference budget (12 months) | $240–500 | Anthropic Claude usage at projected scale |
| Supabase + Resend scale-up | $500–1,000 | For when free tiers are exhausted (~10K MAU) |
| Professional brand identity & icon | $3,000–8,000 | Designer, accessibility audit, App Store assets |
| Founder runway (12 mo) | $36,000–60,000 | Modest part-time stipend so I can keep building full-time |
| Municipal pilot kickstart fund | $5,000–20,000 | Travel, conference fees, pilot integration support |
| Marketing & PR | $5,000–15,000 | Outreach to journalists, civic-tech community, podcasts |
| Legal & accounting | $2,000–5,000 | LLC setup, 1099 contractor agreements, basic IP |
| Reserve / contingency | $5,000–15,000 | For when reality differs from plan |
For grant funders specifically: this project is structurally aligned with civic-tech funding priorities (transparency, accessibility, multilingual access, anti-corruption tooling, AI-for-good). For impact-focused investors: every dollar of capital funds documentable civic outcomes, not Series-A dilution chasing.
Most civic-tech projects fail for one of three reasons: the product is too academic to use, the team runs out of money before product-market fit, or the politics get tangled. Fault Line addresses each:
"The best civic-tech tool is the one that gets used. The second-best is the one that creates real-world consequences. Fault Line is built to be both — and the second part is the reason the first part will work."
Michael Wylde
Moonlit Social Labs
moonlit-social-labs@proton.me
Happy to walk through any part of the product, the architecture, the financial model, or the roadmap. We're easy to reach and we move fast.