Built to serve.
Made available to everyone.

It started with a practical problem

An application often needs one small part of a much larger collection. A screen may need a title, a translation, a price or a section of text. Downloading a complete record or collection for every small request can waste data, make users wait and increase delivery costs.

RIDA was built to make those individual values addressable. It turns JSON records into a static dataset whose local index tells a reader exactly where a stored field lives. The application can request that field through an ordinary HTTP byte range.

This approach is useful across different kinds of JSON data. The subject can be educational material, product information, research records, reference content or another collection. What matters is how the application needs to read it.

The first two years were a paid service

For the first two years, RIDA was provided as a paid service. During that period, around 1,200 people approached us about it. That interest showed us that the problem extended beyond our own applications.

People used these plans during the first two years. Continuing to provide the service through subscriptions was an available path. A managed service could charge for preparing datasets, storing files, delivering data and providing an account dashboard. Running that service would also involve infrastructure, support and operating costs.

We decided that continuing to sell those plans should not be the requirement for using the underlying library. Developers should be able to build their own datasets and choose the hosting arrangement that suits them.

A decision guided by the foundation

RIDA was developed under Qasra Foundation. The foundation’s CEO directed us to make it available for public benefit, with helping people as the purpose of the work.

We therefore made the library available without a subscription fee. The decision was to give more people access to the work and let them apply it in their own projects, rather than make subscription profit the objective.

That includes developers creating applications for people with limited mobile data, small organisations working within tight budgets, and projects that need to make large collections easier to access. We want the usefulness of RIDA to extend beyond the service through which it first reached users.

What is free, and what still has a cost

Using the RIDA library does not require a RIDA hosting subscription. You can prepare JSON, build a dataset, keep its index with your reader and serve the data from your chosen host.

Storage and delivery are still services supplied by the host you choose. Its storage fees, bandwidth charges, request charges and cache limits continue to apply. Making RIDA available without a subscription does not make every provider’s infrastructure free.

The saving comes from changing how much data an application requests. When a screen needs one field, RIDA can fetch that field’s stored value instead of the rest of the record. If the provider charges by delivered bytes, smaller reads can reduce that part of the bill.

The amount saved depends on the dataset and usage. Large field values still produce large reads; response headers add overhead; and providers that charge per request have different economics. Our benchmark examples show measured workloads and estimated hosting costs so developers can judge the approach for themselves.

Keep control of your application and data

Your application can use its own storage or CDN, its own record identifiers and its own interface. The library creates static files and reads their values; it does not require a RIDA account to decide what a screen should display.

The data file contains stored values. The local index holds the addresses needed to find them. A folder map can preserve meaningful names, and an encrypted build creates a separate key that must be kept private and supplied to an authorised reader.

Choosing to encrypt is separate from choosing a hosting provider. Encryption helps protect stored values from readers who do not hold the key. Applications remain responsible for protecting and delivering that key, and for any user accounts or access rules they need.

Available without a subscription, under its license

RIDA is distributed under the RIDA Proprietary License. The license permits using and modifying it as a component of free or paid applications, subject to its terms and the required attribution notice.

It does not permit publishing, redistributing or selling RIDA as a standalone library or software product. The license does not apply to the data files you create with RIDA. Read the license supplied with the library before distributing an application that includes it.

Making the library available without a subscription is our way of allowing more developers to put the work to use while retaining the authorship and distribution terms of the project.

Judge it by what it does for your project

Start with a small, representative collection. Look at which values your application requests, let the scanner measure the input, and read the resulting dataset using the same access pattern your users will have.

Then compare the transferred bytes, the time taken and your provider’s billing model. RIDA is most useful when those measurements show that independently readable fields suit the application.

Our purpose is to make that option available to more people. The foundation’s decision lets developers use the library and decide for themselves where it helps.