Not a dumb question. PACER costs some money to maintain, and the fees it charges also pays for the digital maintenance/upgrade of the court system overall. But

Not a dumb question. PACER costs some money to maintain, and the fees it charges also pays for the digital maintenance/upgrade of the court system overall. But there's substantial criticism that the fees it charges are still very excessive (10 cents per page, despite the actual cost of storage+retrieval being 1/20,000th of a cent), especially because it's taxpayer funded: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/04/us/politics/pacer-fees-lawsuit.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/04/us/politics/pacer-fees-la... https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/07/opinion/pacer-court-records.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/07/opinion/pacer-court-recor... https://qz.com/283772/why-pacer-should-and-should-not-be-like-edgar/ https://qz.com/283772/why-pacer-should-and-should-not-be-lik...