ERstat tracks ER wait times at 800+ Canadian hospitals. Free, ad-free, no government money.
Built by one person (Jason) for the ~1,500+ people who use it daily.
Less than a coffee.
Cancel anytime, no questions asked.
Fund expansion.
Helps cover unpaid development time.
Cancel any time. No questions. No retention scripts.
ERstat serves about 1,500 people a day — many of them on the worst night of their year. The site is free, ad-free, and takes no government money. The point is that it's there when you need it.
It's built and run by one person on weekends and evenings. That's me. Jason. I'm a software contractor with paying clients; every hour I spend on ERstat is an hour I'm not billing. Reader support is what lets me keep doing this without taking a hit.
If reader support covers the costs, ERstat stays the way it is: free, fast, and not selling anyone anything.
Honest breakdown of what ERstat costs to run, including my time:
Hosting, the data pipeline that pulls from 800 hospital sources every five minutes, prediction model compute, the closure notification system, domain, monitoring, database storage.
I work on ERstat about 20 hours a week on top of my regular contracting obligations. Building features, fixing breakage, expanding coverage, responding to readers, talking to hospitals about the portal product. At $40/hour — less than many trades and well below market rate for production software engineering — that's about $3,440/month of unpaid work.
The statistical model that estimates wait times for 400+ silent hospitals (the rural and northern ones nobody else tracks) needs continuous improvement. User wait reports feed back into the model to make it more accurate over time. This is the work that makes ERstat genuinely different from a provincial dashboard, and the work that benefits most from sustained funding.
Reader support is the only funding model that can pay for this work. Government grants would come with restrictions on which provinces get priority. Hospital money funding the model that estimates hospital wait times would be a conflict of interest. Foundation grants would slow expansion to a multi-year cycle. Reader contributions let me decide what to build next based on what readers actually need.
If 167 readers chip in $3/month, infrastructure is covered. If 1,314 readers do — about 3% of monthly users — ERstat becomes sustainable enough that I can put more hours into it instead of fewer.
ERstat has one revenue stream currently.
Readers like you. Recurring and one-time support from people who use the public site. This is the source that keeps ERstat independent of anyone whose data it covers.
What ERstat does not take: government grants, display ads, sponsored content, or third-party money that would influence what data appears on the public site. Hospital portal customers see their own data. They don't get to change what anyone else sees.
If hospital revenue ever started shaping what's published, ERstat would stop being worth using. Reader support is what keeps that line clean.
The existing options for checking ER wait times in Canada weren't good enough. Provincial wait time pages cover some hospitals in some provinces, often with delays, sometimes not at all. Five provinces publish no ER data. Most rural and northern Canadians have no way to check a wait time before they leave for the hospital.
ERstat closes those gaps. Live data for 220+ hospitals. A statistical model that estimates wait times at another 400+ hospitals nobody else tracks. Closure alerts when an ER goes offline. All free, all the time, on every device.
It stays that way because readers pay for it. That's the model.
— Jason
No. ERstat isn't a registered Canadian charity. I looked into it. It would mean a board of directors, restrictions on the hospital portal as a commercial activity, and 6 to 18 months of CRA paperwork. The tax credit on a $36/year donation works out to about $8. The tradeoff isn't worth it right now. If ERstat ever grows enough that registered-charity status becomes useful for grants or major gifts, I'll revisit it.
Don't pay. ERstat will always be free. The whole point is that it's there when you need it. If reading this page made you feel bad about not contributing, that wasn't the intent. Close the tab and use the site.
Yes. Flip the toggle above from Monthly to One-time, or enter any amount in the custom field. Most of the support ERstat receives is one-time gifts after someone has had a good experience with the site.
The scrapers that pull provincial data every five minutes. The prediction model that fills in coverage for 400+ hospitals no one publishes. The closure notification systems. Server costs. Database storage. And my time — I'm a software contractor with clients in Canada and the US, and every hour I spend on ERstat is an hour I'm not billing a paying client. Currently I'm absorbing all of that. If reader support eventually covers more than infrastructure, the next dollar lets me trade billable hours for ERstat hours without taking a hit. That's what "sustainable" means here. Not me getting rich, just being able to put the work in without it costing me money to do.
That would end ERstat. The public-site data is built from the same provincial sources hospitals already publish to. I can't selectively shade it without it being immediately obvious to anyone comparing my numbers to theirs. The hospital portal product gives subscribers more visibility into their own data, not less visibility for anyone else.
An ER wait time site with display ads becomes a different kind of product. The incentive shifts from "give people accurate information fast" to "keep them on the page longer." That's bad for users in stressful situations and bad for the integrity of the data. ERstat will stay ad-free.
If you work in a Canadian ER, the free healthcare worker portal lets your team report wait times and closures directly. Sign up here. That's a different kind of contribution and equally valuable.
Yes. Recurring contributions are managed through Stripe and can be cancelled with one click from the email receipt, by signing in to manage your subscription, or by emailing hello@erstat.ca. No phone calls, no retention scripts.
No. ERstat doesn't sell, share, or rent contact information. See the privacy policy for details.
Get occasional updates from me. New hospitals added, new provinces covered, what I'm working on. Roughly one email a month. No spam, no marketing, easy unsubscribe.
Separate from any contribution. Unsubscribe in one click.
No ads. No data sales. No investor pressure. No government control over what gets covered. Just a public utility for Canadian ER visibility, paid for by the people it serves.