SUPPORT THE WORK
If a tool here saved you something,
drop us a few bucks.
Office Blues runs lean. There are no investors, no consultancy retainer, no advertising. The Meeting Tax Calculator is free. The Daily Pulse is free. The newsletter is free. Anything we ship next will be free at the core, with optional paid extensions only where the cost of shipping the work demands it.
Pick an amount
WHERE THE MONEY GOES
Tips fund the next tool, not the last one.
Office Blues is a one-person operation with no profit motive and a server bill. Tips don't pay a salary, fund a runway, or unlock a feature wall. They cover the bare cost of the next thing we ship.
- SERVER
The VPS that hosts the data fetchers, the cron jobs, and the daily-pulse pipeline. ~$6/month.
- API TIER
Bumping a free-tier BLS / Census / BEA key to a paid tier when the rate limit gets in the way of a new tool.
- DATA
One-time licensing for a dataset that isn't free at the federal level — only when the tool needs it.
- TOOLS
The next thing on the list that we'd otherwise skip because it doesn't pay for itself yet.
Other ways to support, all free to you
- Subscribe. The newsletter ships every Tuesday with one labor-economy number, one verdict line, and the source link. List size is the single biggest compounding asset we have.
- Share a tool with a coworker. The Meeting Tax Calculator works best when forwarded inside a Slack channel or a meeting invite reply. The MTC link is shareable; no signup required for the recipient.
- Cite us. If you write about labor markets, return-to-office, or meeting culture, link to the data. Every reading on the Daily Pulse page carries its own BLS source URL — you can verify and cite the primary source directly.
- Tell us what’s wrong. The repo is instrumented for fast correction. Open an issue or reply to the newsletter. Errors get fixed in commits, not in retractions; we want yours.
What we don’t do with your money
- We don’t share your name or email.
- We don’t add you to a list.
- We don’t send you a thank-you email or a follow-up ask.
- We don’t print a sponsor wall.
- We don’t offer tax-deductible receipts — we are not a registered nonprofit, and pretending otherwise is the kind of fabricated scale this site exists to call out.