CharityVerify – Trust scores for 138K Canadian charities

Name: CharityVerify – Trust scores for 138K Canadian charities
Availability: InStock
Author: buchler

by buchler·Feb 24, 2026·2 points·0 comments

Visit Project View on HN

AI Analysis

●●●BangerSolve My ProblemEye Candy

Charity trust scores from 15 years of CRA data; free for everyone, no login required.

Strengths

•Aggregated 138K charities + 457K directors into one queryable database—previously scattered across CRA
•Three-axis scoring (legitimacy, effectiveness, compliance) with peer benchmarking by size/category—genuinely novel
•Claude-powered narrative explanations in plain English instead of jargon

Weaknesses

•Monetization limited to $49/mo charity profiles; free tier may saturate before reaching profitability
•Only covers Canadian charities; US/UK equivalents (GiveWell, Charity Navigator) already established

Post Description

I built CharityVerify to make Canadian charity data actually usable.

The Canada Revenue Agency publishes T3010 forms for every registered charity, but they're scattered across clunky databases with no standardization or comparability. I collected 15 years of filings for all 138,203 charities and built a trust scoring system on top.

Stack: - Python + Playwright for CRA data collection (4s rate-limited) - PostgreSQL (Supabase) — 12 T3010 tables, 138K charities, 457K directors, 362K directorship links - Express.js REST API on Fly.io - Daily GitHub Actions sync for new filings - On-demand narrative generation via Claude Haiku

Scoring algorithm: Three 0-100 scores per charity: 1. Legitimacy (filing consistency, directorship stability, CRA compliance) 2. Effectiveness (program spending ratio, overhead, donation efficiency) 3. Compliance (sanctions screening, FATF risk, political activity limits)

Each charity gets a letter grade (A+ to F, or NR for insufficient data).

Findings: - Only 186 out of 85,507 registered charities scored A+ - Average effectiveness score: 51.6/100 - 487,692 flags generated (directorship overlap, compensation issues, filing gaps, etc.)

The core search/view is free. I'm building a tiered REST API for professional use cases (due diligence firms, grant-making orgs, etc.).

Code is closed-source for now, but the underlying CRA data is public domain. Happy to discuss the data pipeline, scoring methodology, or data collection approach.