Plural (Open States)

Plural is an AI-powered policy-tracking platform built around democratizing legislative monitoring — a field long dominated by expensive enterprise tools. It offers real-time updates, AI bill summaries, predictive analytics on outcomes, and stakeholder collaboration, positioning itself as a more accessible alternative to incumbents like FiscalNote and Quorum.

Plural also stewards Open States, a long-running open-data project that provides free and API-based access to state legislative data. With roots in the 'Open States / SixOne Labs' lineage, the Open States dataset is a widely used civic-tech resource for journalists, researchers, and civic developers. Today Open States focuses mainly on its free Open API, while most of its legacy tools have moved into Plural's paid application.

That shift is the honest tension around Plural: given its 'democratize policymaking' framing, moving Open States tooling behind a paid product has drawn concern from the civic-tech community that free access is narrowing, even as the underlying open dataset remains available through the API. Plural is also smaller and less proven than the major incumbents, and its AI summaries and predictions carry the standard verify-before-you-rely caveat.