Alpha — early access. This page describes an early-stage product; features and pricing may change.
Program page Steady Grants
Grant copilot for small nonprofits — San Diego County

Steady Grants program summary

Plain-language summary
What this is
Steady Grants scans your organization's real mission statements, budgets, program reports, and past proposals — then finds matching grants and assembles a first draft in your voice, ready for you to review and submit.
Who it's for
A small San Diego-County nonprofit where one person does everything, including the grant application — see the eligibility checklist below.
What it costs
Flat setup fee, flat monthly price. No commission, ever — not a percentage of your award, under any tier.
Eligibility

Built for the org where one person does everything, including the grant application.

Steady Grants is built for a specific buyer, not "every nonprofit" — that specificity is deliberate.

  • A San Diego-County 501(c)(3) with an annual operating budget roughly $100K–$500K and no dedicated grant-writing staff — the executive director, a program manager, or an outside contractor writes the proposals today.4
  • Applies to 2–4 foundation or local/regional grants a year and already has some digitized paperwork — a mission statement, a past annual report, budgets, even a rejected prior application, scattered across email or a shared drive.
  • Wants a professionally drafted first pass without paying $1,500–$5,000 for a single foundation proposal, or $5,000–$15,000+ for a federal one.1
  • Not a fit yet: orgs applying primarily for federal grants (AI-disclosure rules there are still an open compliance question — see Program file below), or orgs with essentially no digitized documents to ground a draft in.
How it works

Three steps, one grounded org profile.

1

Discovery scan

Matches your mission, program area, and geography against open foundation and local/regional grant opportunities, ranked by fit — not a generic RFP firehose.

2

Document grounding

Ingests your actual mission statements, budgets, program reports, and past proposals at setup, so drafts sound like your org, not a template. If a fact is missing, it asks you — it doesn't invent one.

3

First-draft assembly

Produces a submission-ready first draft of narrative sections for you to review, edit, and submit yourself. Human finalizes and submits, always — never an autonomous auto-submit.

Fees

Flat fee. Flat subscription. No percentage of your award — ever.

$299 one-time setup covers document ingestion and building your org profile. Then a flat monthly price, no per-seat fees.

TierSetupMonthlyIncludes
Starter $299 one-time $49/mo Grant opportunity discovery scan; 1 assisted draft/month; core document grounding. Built for orgs at the lower end of the budget band.
Growth — most orgs choose this $299 one-time $99/mo Everything in Starter, plus up to 3 assisted drafts/month and deeper document ingestion, including org "voice" tuning.

Both tiers share the same $299 one-time setup fee, which covers document ingestion and building your org profile.

Where Steady Grants pays for itself

Steady Grants, 1 year
$887–$1,487
1 foundation proposal
$1,500–$5,000
1 federal proposal
$5,000–$15,000+

Bars scaled to the $15,000 federal-proposal ceiling. Steady Grants' full first-year cost (setup + 12 months) is less than one typical foundation proposal fee — it pays for itself the first time it produces one usable draft, or covers roughly 12–20 hours of an ED's own drafting time at a $75/hr market rate.1

Why flat-fee, always No percentage-of-award tier — not as an add-on, not as an option.

The AFP Code of Ethical Standards and the Grant Professionals Association's own Code of Ethics both name percentage-of-funds-raised compensation as a violation members must never accept.2 A tool priced any other way would ask your board's grant committee to work with a vendor they'd have to flag. We don't build that tier — not as an add-on, not as an option.

Simulated demo

What using it actually looks like.

Three scripted, click-through scenarios — a discovery scan, a document-grounded draft interview, and a pipeline dashboard. Every screen is simulated with synthetic, illustrative data; nothing shown was generated by a real system.

Steady Grants — simulated product walkthroughSimulated · not a live product
Questions a board or ED should ask first

The five questions every ED asks first.

Isn't this just AI writing our grant applications — will funders penalize us?
No. Steady Grants assembles a first draft grounded in your org's own real documents, for you to review, edit, and submit in your own voice — it never auto-submits anything. In Candid's own funder survey, 67% of funders are still undecided about AI-assisted applications and only 23% currently reject them outright; one funder in that survey specifically described AI assistance as helping under-resourced and non-native-English-speaking organizations "level the playing field." Steady Grants is built for the human-finalizes-and-submits side of that line. Source: Candid funder survey, published 2024-08-14 — see Program file below for the full figure and its staleness flag.
Grantable already does this and has a nonprofit discount at our size — why switch?
Grantable is real and we don't pretend otherwise. The difference is depth and posture: Steady Grants is built around deep ingestion of your organization's actual historical documents, not just chat-based drafting, plus San Diego-local service and an ethics-first pricing stance — not a longer feature list, a different relationship.
Will you take a percentage of what we win, like some consultants push for?
No, and we never will. Flat setup fee plus flat monthly subscription, full stop. The AFP Code of Ethical Standards and the Grant Professionals Association's Code of Ethics both name percentage-of-funds compensation as the specific practice their members must refuse. A tool priced any other way would ask your organization to work with a vendor your own fundraising staff or board should distrust.
Our documents aren't organized — scattered PDFs, old emails, a messy Drive folder. Can this even work?
Partially organized is fine — the setup fee specifically covers organizing scattered documents into a usable org profile. Essentially zero digital paper trail (no past proposals, no written program descriptions, no budget documents) is a genuinely poor fit today, and we'll tell you that honestly rather than take the setup fee anyway.
Is there legal or compliance risk using AI for federal grant applications specifically?
Honestly: unresolved. Federal agencies appear to have diverging AI-disclosure policies that we have not independently verified against primary sources. That's exactly why Steady Grants is scoped to foundation and local/regional grants first — we won't make a federal-compliance claim we haven't checked. If your org applies primarily for federal funding, we're not positioned to serve you yet.
What would change our mind

We're stating our own conditions that would change our mind up front.

A pitch that can't say what would falsify it isn't a serious one.

1Fewer than 3 real SD-County EDs agree to a free pilot within a 4–6 week outreach window.
2Pilot drafts require more ED rewriting than starting from scratch — net negative time savings.
3A named competitor ships equivalent document-grounding and local positioning before our first pilot cohort finishes.
4The specific foundations our ICP relies on skew disproportionately toward the AI-rejecting funder cohort.
5No workable low/no-cost distribution channel materializes within the stated test budgets.
Express interest

One ask: a 15-minute pilot conversation.

Not a purchase, not a signature — a short call with your ED or the person who currently writes your grant applications, to see if a free discovery scan and one draft is worth trying against a real upcoming deadline.

hello@PLACEHOLDER-steadygrants.example
Placeholder contact — Steady Grants has not launched and this address is not monitored.