FAQ 2025

Can you build a large number of homes for us?

Surely a possibility. Depends on details and cost structure. Our cost is $60k materials, $40k labor. Except that requires a crew of 24 skilled people, or 72 unskilled people to do - to build in 5 days. To recruit a crew, we started https://learn.opensourceecology.org/ - and have 2 apprentices on board already. But until we build to a crew of 24, this is not a possibility. With a crew of 24, we can deliver 75 houses in one year in off-grid situations, and 50 houses per year in locations with legal restrictions. If you can provide a labor force of 72 unskilled people, we can build 40 homes in about 6 months from shovel-ready. If you can provide a full time labor force - then we can do a Habitat-for-Humanity style sweat equity build. Ballpark costs may be $40k materials for the starter home (720 sf like this house - https://www.opensourceecology.org/builder_crash_course_2025-2/) and $120k per home finished with 500 hours of your sweat equity per home, or $60k for 1450 sf and $180k finished . These are ballpark figures under specific assumptions, they can be smaller or bigger depending on specifics. If you tell me your budget per house, I can provide a more specific figure of what we can build for that, assuming that you are interested in us building and you don't have the labor. Essentially, for production builds, we can come in at 30-50% lower cost than typical builders.

International Apprenticeship FAQ

For applying from Indonesia, can you provide requirements for an inivitation letter to the Apprenticeship held in Mexico?

The Mexican requirement seems to be $1650 value received in the last 3 months. It can be an employment letter, pension, or scholarship. This is for temporary residents of more than 180 days. [1]. The value of the scholarship is ~$15k/13 = $1250/month, with $600 stipend, so $1850 per month so that our invitation letter would qualify for Mexico.

Links

• FAQ - last updated 2022