Not projections. Not a business plan with a hockey stick. The actual, sourced cost of each phase — what a claim costs, what mines actually sell for, what phase 0 is spending right now — and a ledger that gets published monthly whether the numbers are flattering or not.
The entire signal phase runs on a free stack — hosting, database, and email are all zero-cost tiers, and the domains are already owned. The only real costs are the payment processor's cut and, optionally, a verified X account. Founding Citizen money covers land scouting, feasibility preparation, and design studies — nothing else exists yet to spend it on.
This ledger is the promise kept: it updates monthly, in public, starting with the first dollar that arrives.
This is the part everyone assumes is fantasy-expensive. It isn't. Mining is a mature industry with a mature market — old operations and claims trade hands constantly, and the entry prices are smaller than most people guess. The federal government even publishes the fee schedule.
Sources: BLM mining claim fee schedule; MineListings.com marketplace data; the specific listings cited above are live marketplace examples as of October 2026, not quotes — the right mine will be found in phase 2 scouting.
The land phase is a real-estate-and-equipment problem measured in millions, not a fantasy measured in billions. The billions arrive at phase 3 — building the city itself — and by then the mine is a revenue engine. A $4.9M operation producing ~$2M a year in gross revenue funds construction without asking anyone's permission.
A numbers page that only shows the favorable numbers is a sales page. These are the open questions, stated as open.
The vision calls for rare earths. The real listings cited above are gold and placer operations — they demonstrate that small working mines trade in the single-digit millions, not what rare-earth ground specifically costs. Rare-earth sourcing is phase-2 scouting work, and we won't pretend it's solved.
Mine conversion to habitation is unprecedented. Permits, codes, and regulators for a city inside a mountain don't exist yet anywhere — they'll have to be written with the jurisdiction. Timelines here are genuinely unknown, and we won't invent them.
Phase 3 construction — the city, the works, the port — is a multi-billion-dollar engineering program. No honest number exists for it today because no one has built one. What's honest: the engine that funds it starts at single-digit millions, and it compounds.
The $2M/year figure above is one real operation's actual recent revenue, cited as evidence the model works — not as our forecast. Our forecast doesn't exist yet, because we don't have a mine yet.
Every dollar in, every dollar out, what it bought, what it didn't. The first ledger entry is the month the first founding citizen arrives. If the numbers get ugly, they get published anyway — that's the whole point of putting them on the site.