re:SearchGA Purchase Receipt
Retrieved 2026-04-17 · By kerry@kerryhatcher.com · Document type Purchase receipt (research artifact) View the PDF →
Legal shorthand used here: Rule Nisi = Latin for “unless” — a Georgia show-cause order. MSJ / MPSJ = Motion for (Partial) Summary Judgment. FERPA = Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act. IDEA = Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. ORA = Open Records Act.
What is this document?
This is not a court filing. It’s a credit-card receipt — the one Tyler Technologies emailed back after this site’s researcher purchased the documents that make up the “Court Filings” section of this archive. We’re publishing it for the same reason a journalist keeps their expense reports: so you can see exactly how the sausage was made, and exactly how much it cost.
On April 17, 2026, order #0403FAF7 was placed through re:SearchGA by kerry@kerryhatcher.com. The order covered 26 documents totaling 229 pages, at a subtotal of $114.50, plus a $3.38 credit-card convenience fee, for a grand total of $117.88 charged to a Mastercard ending in 7644. Every PDF now linked from the Court Filings index came out of that transaction.
The receipt also contains an unintentional data set: a per-document line item showing what each filing cost. Because Georgia’s court records are priced largely by the page, the receipt doubles as a rough length-map of the case. Briefs that cost more are longer. The most expensive single item was Plaintiff’s Reply to BCSD’s Rule Nisi Response ($28.00) — a strong hint that the Melody’s lawyers wrote a long, detailed rebuttal. The Complaint itself came in at $19.00; the Motion for Summary Judgment at $17.50; the original Rule Nisi Motion at $13.00; and BCSD’s Answer at $5.50.
We’re including this receipt in the archive for transparency. When a citizen-journalism site tells you “we read the filings,” you deserve to see the cash-register tape.
At a glance
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Retrieved | April 17, 2026 |
| Retrieved by | kerry@kerryhatcher.com |
| Source | Tyler re:SearchGA |
| Order number | #0403FAF7 |
| Documents | 26 |
| Total pages | 229 |
| Subtotal | $114.50 |
| Card convenience fee | $3.38 |
| Grand total | $117.88 |
| Payment | Mastercard ending 7644 |
| Document type | Purchase receipt (research artifact) |
Deep dive — public access to court records in Georgia
How much transparency actually costs
Georgia court filings are public. That doesn’t mean they’re free.
The docket — the list of what’s been filed — is free to view on re:SearchGA. But to actually read any of the documents behind those docket entries, you have to pay. For this case, obtaining a complete set of briefs, motions, orders, and exhibits cost $117.88 out of pocket. That’s for one lawsuit. If a citizen wanted to follow, say, every open-records case filed in Georgia in a given month, the cost would quickly run into the thousands.
This is the uncomfortable arithmetic of open courts in the digital era. The records are open, in the legal sense. Anyone with an internet connection and a credit card can reach them. But cost is a filter, and filters shape who participates. A wealthy media outlet or a law firm can easily absorb $117.88 to read one case. A retired citizen on a fixed income, a high-school journalism class, a small local blogger — they cannot absorb it at scale. The result is that Georgia’s public records are, in practice, more available to some members of the public than to others.
The Macon Melody’s underlying lawsuit is a fight about another kind of fee (whether BCSD can charge fees to frustrate an open-records request). The question is the same: who can afford to watch the government?
Tyler Technologies / Odyssey eFileGA’s role
The receipt is branded re:SearchGA, but the company behind it is Tyler Technologies, Inc., a publicly traded software vendor based in Plano, Texas. Tyler sells a suite of court-management software to state and local governments across the U.S.:
- Odyssey — the case management system (CMS) that clerks use internally to enter filings, assign judges, schedule hearings, and keep case records.
- eFileGA — the electronic filing portal attorneys use to submit new documents to Georgia courts.
- re:SearchGA — the public search and document-retrieval portal this receipt comes from.
When an attorney files a motion in Bibb County, it flows through eFileGA, lands in Odyssey on the clerk’s screen, gets docketed, and then becomes visible on re:SearchGA for the rest of us. A single vendor controls most of the pipeline.
That concentration has upsides: statewide consistency, a single login, uniform document formats. It also has downsides: a private company sets the pricing, controls the user experience, and collects credit-card convenience fees from citizens seeking public records. The $3.38 fee on this receipt is the kind of small friction that adds up over a jurisdiction. The Bibb County Clerk of Court does not receive that $3.38; Tyler’s payment processor does.
None of this is unique to Georgia — Tyler dominates the U.S. court-tech market — but it’s worth naming because “government records access” increasingly means “access via a vendor.”
Per-page and per-document pricing
Georgia court record pricing combines several components, typically:
- A per-page fee for images and filings (often around $0.50 per page)
- A minimum per-document charge so that one-page documents aren’t effectively free
- A service/convenience fee on the card transaction
For this order, the math works out to roughly $0.50 per page averaged across the set ($114.50 ÷ 229 pages ≈ $0.50), which is consistent with Georgia’s published fee schedule for court records. The $3.38 card fee on top is a flat percentage-based surcharge the payment processor charges.
Two things follow from this pricing model:
- Long briefs are expensive. A 56-page reply brief costs more than a 3-page order, regardless of which document is more legally significant. Cost and importance don’t track each other.
- Bulk access is punishing. A journalist investigating a pattern across 40 cases is priced out in a way a journalist covering one case is not.
There is no “subscription” tier of re:SearchGA for the general public. Pricing is transactional. Pay per document, every time.
What the cost tells you about which briefs are longest
Because pricing is (roughly) linear with page count, the receipt becomes a back-of-the-envelope page-count estimate for each filing in this case. Converting the five most expensive items at ~$0.50/page:
| Filing | Price | Approx. pages | What that suggests |
|---|---|---|---|
| Plaintiff’s Reply to BCSD’s Rule Nisi Response | $28.00 | ~56 pages | A major briefing push — probably the Melody’s most detailed argument on FERPA/IDEA preemption |
| Complaint | $19.00 | ~38 pages | A substantial complaint with detailed factual allegations and likely exhibits |
| Motion for Summary Judgment | $17.50 | ~35 pages | A full MSJ brief with its own record citations |
| Rule Nisi Motion | $13.00 | ~26 pages | A serious opening motion, not a short procedural filler |
| Answer | $5.50 | ~11 pages | A standard defensive answer — short because it’s mostly admit/deny paragraphs |
Two quick reads from this pattern:
- The plaintiff is doing more writing than the defendant. In a typical civil case the defendant’s Answer is the shortest filing, but here the Melody’s Reply ($28.00) is dramatically longer than BCSD’s Response to the Rule Nisi that triggered it. That’s consistent with the Melody treating this as a high-stakes, issue-defining fight.
- The Reply being the longest brief is unusual. Replies are normally shorter than the opening motion (because they’re just responding). A giant Reply usually means the plaintiff’s lawyer thought BCSD’s Response raised new arguments — likely FERPA (Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act) or IDEA (Individuals with Disabilities Education Act) defenses — that needed to be systematically dismantled.
None of this is a substitute for reading the briefs themselves (which is why we bought them). But the receipt is a useful first pass.
Why this matters
The phrase “public records” hides an entire economy. This receipt is what that economy looks like for one lawsuit, on one day, in one county, purchased by one citizen: $117.88. The money flowed to a private Texas software company and its payment processor. The documents are now on this website, free, because the researcher decided to share them. That’s not how it has to work — it’s how it happened to work this time, because one person paid and one person published.
Multiply that across a state, a year, and every citizen who would otherwise like to know what their school district is doing, and you get a picture of why open-records fights matter: access that is technically equal is not practically equal when it’s metered by the page. Georgia has done much of the hard work of putting court records online. The remaining question — who can afford to read them — is not a technical question. It’s a policy question. The receipt on this page is one small piece of evidence in that larger conversation.
Read the original
Part of Court Filings · Case No. 2025-CV-083495 · Bibb County Superior Court