8.5 million grants reported by U.S. private foundations.
Tell us where to set it up.The grants U.S. private foundations actually paid, as filed with the IRS: who got it, for what stated purpose, in what amount, in which city and state. 111,367 funders and 8,533,005 grants as of the v1 snapshot, with grant listings taken from Part XV of the 990-PF, the section where foundations itemize what they actually paid out.
We deploy the database and the bundled search interface onto a managed Postgres project (Neon, so there are no servers to tend; a VPS works too if you prefer one). You get a 30-day setup window with a probes-verified handoff and email Q&A. After that, documentation.
This is the working layer, built for fundraisers rather than analysts. Search funders by name. Pull a funder's full giving history: totals, typical grant size, where the money goes. Run the reverse search fundraisers live on: who funds food banks in Texas, who gave to organizations like yours. The SQL cookbook ships too, as a power-user extra.
We run the update pipeline against the IRS public bulk data each month. After the first year, run it yourself with the shipped scripts and runbook, or have us keep running it for about $149 a year.
Founding licenses include the upgraded app interface when it ships.
Every release passes a 9-point data-integrity gate before it goes out the door. The gate log is the product of measurement, not assurances, and we keep it.
Foundations file Form 990-PF with the IRS, and the IRS publishes the electronic filings as bulk data. GrantTrace is that data, parsed, deduplicated, and indexed. Here is exactly where the edges are.
Recipients are identified by name and city or state, exactly as the foundation typed them. Recipient EINs do not exist in e-filed 990-PF data, so no product has them. The reverse search runs on names, geography, and the foundation's own purpose text. It works the way fundraisers actually search, and it will not resolve a recipient to a tax record, because nothing can.
Coverage runs by tax year. 2022 onward is complete as published: we hold grant data for roughly three quarters of the funder-periods the IRS indexes for those years, the gap is mostly foundations whose filings list zero grants. Tax year 2021 sits at roughly 70% of indexed funder-periods. The shortfall was an IRS publication quirk, not missing data: the agency split its 2022 receipts across two bulk files and linked only one from its download page. We found the second file, verified every one of the 37,237 filings our copy was missing against it, and added them. That is the kind of check the monthly refresh and the 9-point gate exist for. 2019 and 2020 arrive only through late-filed and amended returns, about 1% of grant rows.
Amounts are signed as filed. A negative number is a recovery: the foundation took money back. When GrantTrace shows a “typical grant,” it means the median of positive grants. In our 2024 reference sample that median was $5,000; the largest single grant line as filed runs to $8.1 billion, which says something about how wide this field swings.
The corpus is private foundations. Public charities do not itemize grants in their filings, so they are not here, and neither is anything a foundation merely approved but had not yet paid.
Without the monthly refresh the data goes stale. It keeps working; it just ages.
$997. One time.
That covers the snapshot, the white-glove setup, the search interface, and twelve months of managed monthly refresh. Year two onward is free if you run the refresh yourself (scripts and runbook included), or about $149 a year if we run it for you.
Founding licenses include the upgraded app interface when it ships.
Tell us where to set it up.You get a 30-day setup window. We create your managed Postgres project, restore the snapshot, deploy the search interface, and run the verification probes against your copy. You poke at it, ask questions by email, and at handoff you hold the keys, the docs, and the runbook.
No. The interface is the product; nobody on your side writes SQL to use it. If you do write SQL, the cookbook is there, and if you want the whole thing on a VPS under your own control, that option exists for technical buyers.
Once a month, the pipeline pulls the newest IRS bulk filings, parses the grant listings, applies the same deduplication rule (most recent filing year wins, by funder and tax period), and updates your database. Every release passes the same 9-point integrity gate. For the first year we run it; after that, the scripts and runbook are yours, or we keep running it for about $149 a year.
Keep it, if it earns its keep for prospect research and profiles. GrantTrace replaces the other part, the part fundraisers live in: a funder's actual grant history and the reverse search across 8.5 million grants. For less than one year of a big-database subscription, once, forever.
A database, an interface, and a refresh pipeline. An install that answers 'who funds work like my organization' in seconds.
Higher Castle