Perma
Perma.cc is a Harvard Law School Library-operated web archiving service that creates permanent, library-backed records of cited web pages to prevent link rot in legal and academic citations, serving scholars, courts, journals, law firms, and publishers through a distributed registrar network.
- Company typePrivate
- Founded2014
- HeadquartersCambridge, United States
- Headcount—
- GTM typeB2B and B2C
- OfferingSoftware
What Perma does
Perma.cc is a web archiving service that helps scholars, journals, courts, and other entities create permanent, immutable records of the web sources they cite, directly addressing the problem of link rot in legal and academic citations. The service, operated by President and Fellows of Harvard College through the Harvard Law School Library's Library Innovation Lab, fetches a user-submitted URL, stores the page in the industry-standard WARC (Web ARChive) format together with a PNG screenshot, and returns a permanent short-URL Perma Link that resolves to an unalterable record. The platform supports browser-based capture tools, a public RESTful API, Memento framework interoperability, private/dark archive modes, and folder/annotation features for organizing citation libraries. The codebase is open source under a dual MIT/GPL license.
The service is delivered through four distinct signup tiers: Perma.cc for Libraries and Perma.cc for Courts are offered free with unlimited usage to academic libraries and state/federal courts that act as registrars for their communities; Perma.cc for Individuals provides a 10-link free trial followed by tiered monthly subscriptions ($10, $25, or $100) or one-time link purchases ($15, $30, or $125); and Perma.cc for Other Organizations provides quote-based team subscriptions for law firms, publishers, and news organizations that wish to administer Perma accounts for their staff. A distributed network of more than 150 journals, courts, and universities serves as registrars that administer the service locally, while multi-host redundancy is maintained through Internet Archive replication and a documented two-year then ten-year contingency plan with Harvard Law Library preservation.
Perma.cc is endorsed by The Bluebook (20th edition, Rule 18.2.1(d)) as an example reliable archival tool for legal citations, won the 2015 Webby Award for Best Law Website, and is supported by a partner ecosystem that includes the Internet Archive, Cloudflare, Webrecorder, the Digital Public Library of America, the Legal Information Preservation Alliance, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, and the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. The service has been used in briefs filed in the U.S. Supreme Court, multiple U.S. Courts of Appeals, and state appellate courts, and is relied upon by the Law Library of Congress, the U.S. Department of Justice, and the American Bar Association.
Perma firmographics
Firmographics- Name
- Perma
- Legal name
- President and Fellows of Harvard College (operating the Perma.cc service through the Harvard Law School Library)
- Website
- https://perma.cc
- Company type
- Private
- Founded year
- 2014
- Operating status
- Operating
- Short description
- Perma.cc is a Harvard Law School Library-operated web archiving service that creates permanent, library-backed records of cited web pages to prevent link rot in legal and academic citations, serving scholars, courts, journals, law firms, and publishers through a distributed registrar network.
- Ownership category
- akta.pro rank
Where Perma is headquartered
LocationHeadquarters
- HQ city
- Cambridge
- HQ country
- United States
- HQ region
- North America
Offices1 record
Markets served
Perma business model
Business model- GTM type
- B2B and B2C
- Offering type
- Software
- Cost components
- Personnel, Technology or R&D, Infrastructure, Operations, Marketing or Sales
Revenue model
- Paid individual monthly subscriptions: Recurring monthly subscriptions for individuals not affiliated with a registrar: $10/month for 10 links, $25/month for 100 links, $100/month for 500 links. Unused links do not carry over.
- Paid individual one-time link purchases: One-time purchases of link bundles: 10 links for $15, 100 links for $30, 500 links for $125.
- Paid team/organization registrar subscriptions: Quote-based monthly or annual subscriptions for law firms, publishers, news organizations and other entities to become registrars and administer Perma accounts to their users. Pricing depends on number of individual accounts and expected monthly link volume.
- Free usage for academic libraries and courts: Free unlimited usage plans for academic libraries (and their affiliated scholars, faculty, students, staff) and for state/federal courts and their personnel. Drives ecosystem growth rather than direct revenue.
Pricing tiers
| Model | Billing | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Freemium | Annual | Free unlimited for academic libraries and courts via registrar model |
| Subscription | Monthly | Individual monthly subscription (10 links/month) |
| Subscription | Monthly | Individual monthly subscription (100 links/month) |
| Subscription | Monthly | Individual monthly subscription (500 links/month) |
| One time/ perpetual license | Pay-as-you-go | One-time purchase of 10 links |
| One time/ perpetual license | Pay-as-you-go | One-time purchase of 100 links |
| One time/ perpetual license | Pay-as-you-go | One-time purchase of 500 links |
| Subscription | Monthly | Team / organization registrar subscription (quote-based) |
Go-to-market motion4 records
Distribution channels5 records
Marketing channels8 records
Perma product offering
Product offeringCore offering
Perma.cc is a web archiving service that helps scholars, journals, courts, and others create permanent, immutable records of the web sources they cite. When a user submits a URL, Perma.cc fetches the page, stores it in the industry-standard WARC (Web ARChive) file format along with a PNG screenshot, and returns a permanent "Perma Link" short URL backed by participating university libraries. The service addresses "link rot," the decay of cited URLs into broken or altered pages, and is operated as a free offering for academic libraries and courts via a registrar network, with paid subscription tiers for individuals and organizations.
Product overview
Perma.cc is a single unified web archiving platform, not a multi-product suite with separate codebases, but it is offered through several distinct user/registrar programs that target specific audiences. The core Perma.cc service generates Perma Links and Perma Records — permanent WARC and PNG snapshots of cited web pages — and is delivered through specialized signup tiers: Perma.cc for Libraries (free registrar program), Perma.cc for Courts (free for judicial use), Perma.cc for Other Organizations (paid team subscriptions), and Perma.cc for Individuals (free trial plus paid tiers). The platform is extensible via the Perma.cc Developer API for programmatic archive management and via Perma Browser Tools for in-browser capture, while registrars manage affiliated organizations and sponsored users through the same underlying console.
Differentiator
Problem solved
Functional benefit
Products and services
- Perma.cc Perma.cc is the core web archiving platform that lets users generate Perma Links and Perma Records. It is the unified software service from which all other registrar programs and API products derive.
- Perma Link
Quantifiable outcome
- Webby Award winner for Best Law Website (2015)
- +5 more outcomes
Companies that use Perma
Customer profileNamed customers12 records
Segments5 records
Ideal customer profiles4 records
Perma technology and API
TechnologyTechnology focussed Yes
API detail
- Has API
- Yes
- API docs
- API detail
Core technology
AI maturity
App detail
Feature8 records
Perma partnerships and signals
Strategic signalPartnerships
Seven partnerships are on record, tiered flagship and core.
- Harvard Law School Library — Library Innovation LabflagshipPerma.cc is developed and maintained by the Library Innovation Lab at the Harvard Law School Library, which also serves as the institutional backbone for the service and contingency preservation of the Perma.cc database at the Harvard Law Library.
- Internet ArchiveflagshipInternet Archive is listed as a Supporting Partner. Per the Contingency Plan, Perma.cc plans to automatically submit archives to the Internet Archive, making most Perma Links also resolvable via a Wayback Machine URL for multi-host redundancy.
- Cloudflare, Inc.coreCloudflare is listed as a Supporting Partner and acts as Perma.cc's Content Delivery Network (referenced in the Privacy Policy as a third-party service provider).
- WebrecordercoreWebrecorder is listed as a Supporting Partner of Perma.cc; its ReplayWeb.page tool is referenced as the recommended way to view downloaded WARC/WACZ archives exported from Perma.cc.
- Digital Public Library of America (DPLA)coreDPLA is listed as a Supporting Partner of Perma.cc on the homepage.
- Legal Information Preservation Alliance (LIPA)coreLIPA is listed as a Supporting Partner of Perma.cc on the homepage.
- Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society (Harvard)coreThe Berkman Klein Center is listed as a Supporting Partner of Perma.cc on the homepage, reflecting cross-affiliation within the Harvard ecosystem that supports Perma.cc's mission.
Scale indicators7 records
Recent moves7 records
Expansion highlights6 records
Perma competitors and assessment
Company assessmentEmerging players
- Zotero: Zotero is a widely used open-source reference management tool used by legal scholars, law students, and researchers. It overlaps with Perma.cc at the citation-management workflow layer, though it does not perform web archiving itself.
- ArchiveSocial: ArchiveSocial specializes in social media archiving for public-sector records retention and FOIA compliance, particularly for U.S. government agencies. It is an adjacent peer serving an overlapping public-records preservation mission.
- Webrecorder: Webrecorder builds high-fidelity interactive web archiving tools (including ReplayWeb.page, which Perma.cc recommends for viewing exported WARC/WACZ files). It is a listed Supporting Partner of Perma.cc and competes at the intersection of personal/team web archiving with developer-grade capture quality.
Broad incumbents
- Smarsh: Smarsh is a large compliance and communications archiving provider (with acquired Proofpoint Archive assets). It competes broadly for the same organizational archiving budget that Perma.cc sells into, though focused more on enterprise communications than on citation-specific web preservation.
Direct peers
- Pagefreezer: Pagefreezer offers website and social media archiving for compliance, legal hold, and regulatory needs. Its enterprise sales motion and website-preservation product overlap with Perma.cc's paid team offering for law firms, publishers, and regulated organizations.
- Internet Archive (Wayback Machine): Internet Archive operates the Wayback Machine, the largest public web archiving service. It is the most direct functional substitute for Perma.cc — both create persistent snapshots of cited web pages — and is also a Supporting Partner that Perma.cc replicates archives to for redundancy.
- Archive-It: Archive-It is a subscription web archiving service from the Internet Archive used by libraries, museums, and government agencies to build curated web collections. It overlaps directly with Perma.cc's registrar-based academic and government segments and is the closest commercial web-archiving-as-a-service comparable.
- Hanzo Archives: Hanzo (formerly Hanzo Archives) provides enterprise web and social media archiving for legal, compliance, and ediscovery use cases. It targets the same paid-team-registrar buyer (law firms, publishers, and corporate legal departments) that Perma.cc sells into with its organization subscription tier.
Regional players
- UK Web Archive: The UK Web Archive is a national non-profit web archiving initiative that preserves UK-published websites for researchers and the public. It is analogous to Perma.cc in mission and library-led operating model, but is regionally scoped to UK content.
Others
- Common Crawl: Common Crawl is a non-profit that crawls the open web and provides its archives as a dataset, primarily for AI and research use. It is thematically related to web preservation but serves a different user community (ML/AI developers rather than legal and scholarly citers).
Market position
Strengths4 records
Weaknesses4 records
Competitive moat6 records
Key risks5 records
Key highlights7 records
Customer concentration
Perma social profiles
Digital presencePerma financial estimates
Financial estimateRevenue estimate
Valuation estimate
Perma leadership team
Management profileNumber of profiles
Perma funding detail
Funding detailFunding overview
Funding rounds
Investors
Funding detail is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →
Perma M&A and investment
M&A and investmentM&A
Investments
M&A and investment is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →
Frequently asked questions about Perma
What does Perma do?
Perma.cc is a web archiving service that helps scholars, journals, courts, and others create permanent, immutable records of the web sources they cite. When a user submits a URL, Perma.cc fetches the page, stores it in the industry-standard WARC (Web ARChive) file format along with a PNG screenshot, and returns a permanent "Perma Link" short URL backed by participating university libraries. The service addresses "link rot," the decay of cited URLs into broken or altered pages, and is operated as a free offering for academic libraries and courts via a registrar network, with paid subscription tiers for individuals and organizations.
Is Perma a public or private company?
Perma is a private company. It is classified as nonprofit foundation owned and is currently operating.
When was Perma founded?
Perma was founded in 2014.
Where is Perma based?
Perma is headquartered in Cambridge, United States, in the North America region.
How does Perma make money?
Four revenue lines are on record. Paid individual monthly subscriptions are the primary driver. The others are paid individual one-time link purchases, paid team/organization registrar subscriptions and free usage for academic libraries and courts.
Who are Perma's main competitors?
Emerging players on record are Zotero, ArchiveSocial and Webrecorder. Smarsh is listed as a broad incumbent. Direct peers are Pagefreezer, Internet Archive (Wayback Machine), Archive-It and Hanzo Archives. UK Web Archive is listed as a regional player. Common Crawl is listed as an others.
Does Perma have an API?
Yes. The Perma.cc API is a RESTful API that helps developers create and manage Perma archives without using a web browser. It leverages HTTP GET, POST, PUT, PATCH, and DELETE verbs, with authentication via an API key passed in the Authorization header (e.g., `Authorization: ApiKey your-api-key`). Base endpoint: https://api.perma.cc/v1/. Endpoints cover public archives, user account details, organizations, archives (create, view, download WARC/WACZ, make private, edit title/notes, move, delete, list, batches), folders (create, view, rename, move, delete, list subfolders/archives), and capture jobs (status checks). Pagination is supported via offset and limit parameters (default page size up to 300). Examples are provided in cURL. The Public Archives endpoint does not require an API key. The API is still described as "in its infancy" relative to the broader product. Developer documentation is at perma.cc/docs/developer.