The Economics
Why we charge one cent a day. Where every cent goes. Why we have nothing to do with crypto.
4 min read
LinkedIn generated $16.4 billion in revenue last year. Divide by their one billion users. That is $16.40 per user per year — extracted from your professional identity. They charged you nothing, because you were worth more as a product than as a customer.
We charge you $3.65 because you are worth more as a member than as a product.
People ask us two questions about money. Sometimes in the same breath.
Why don't you make it free?
And: why didn't you launch a token?
The answer to both is the same: because how you fund a system determines who it serves.
The problem with free.
Meta makes roughly $50 per year from each user globally. From American professionals — the most valuable demographic for advertisers — it makes over $270. LinkedIn, owned by Microsoft, generates similar revenue per user and additionally sells access to professional data for recruiting, advertising, and AI training.
To make that money, they must track you. They must profile you. They must manipulate your feed to maximize time-on-platform, because time-on-platform is what they sell to advertisers. They must harvest your professional history for AI training, because that data is worth billions. They must optimize for engagement above all else, because engagement is their product.
This is not corruption. It is the inevitable logic of the advertising model. A free platform must betray you to survive. Not because the founders are evil — because the structure demands it. Strip the surveillance machine, and the free platform has no revenue. The betrayal is not optional. It is structural.
The problem with tokens.
Web3 promised ownership and delivered speculation. People joined networks not to use them but to get rich quickly. The financial incentive to join early overwhelmed every other consideration. Networks that should have competed on product quality competed on token price momentum instead. Communities became casinos. Belonging became financialized.
We have no token. No "number go up." No speculative casino. Our One is not an investment. It is a utility. A platform you use because it is useful, governed because it is governed, and sustained because it is honest.
One cent a day.
At modern scale, cloud infrastructure for a text-and-image social network — without the surveillance tracking apparatus, without the engagement optimization algorithms, without the behavioral data warehouses — costs less than one dollar per user per year. Add the steward team that builds and maintains it, plus legal, security, and governance, and the full honest operating cost is closer to $3 to $4.
We charge one cent a day — $3.65 a year. That covers infrastructure and a proportional share of the people who maintain it. Nothing more. Nothing hidden.
Here is exactly where your $3.65 goes, published annually:
| Category | Our One (annual) | What LinkedIn spends it on instead |
|---|---|---|
| Infrastructure | ~$1.00 | ~$1.00 (same) |
| Team | ~$2.15 | ~$8.00 (plus ad sales, AI training, recruiter tools) |
| Legal/governance | ~$0.50 | ~$7.40 (plus lobbying, surveillance compliance) |
| Total honest cost | $3.65 | ~$16.40 extracted per user |
No extraction premium. No advertising infrastructure. No behavioral data warehouse. No lobbying budget. No compensation structures designed to generate personal wealth from community activity.
What changes at one cent a day.
One cent a day is not primarily about the money. It is about the contract.
A free user is a product. A paying member is a member. But one cent a day does something more specific than that: it removes the financial incentive for everything extractive.
When Our One has no advertisers, the people building it have no financial incentive to optimize for advertiser outcomes. There is no revenue at risk from refusing to build behavioral profiling. There is no financial upside from maximizing time-on-platform at the expense of user wellbeing.
The incentive structure changes completely. Not because of our good intentions — because of the arithmetic. Intentions erode under pressure. Incentives do not.
At different scales.
We are honest about where the model works and where it requires growth.
At 100,000 members: $365,000 annually. We are building toward self-sustaining, and we publish the numbers before they are comfortable. Every platform claims transparency after it is profitable. We publish them now.
At 1,000,000 members: $3.65 million annually. Sufficient for a lean, excellent team.
At 10,000,000 members: $36.5 million annually. Sufficient for a world-class team with real runway.
The model works at scale. Getting to that scale is the work. We publish where we are relative to sustainability. Always.
What if one cent a day isn't enough in the future?
The fee can be adjusted through the amendment process defined in the Constitution. Any proposed adjustment must be accompanied by published operating cost data that justifies the change. The community votes on it.
What cannot happen: the fee structure changing because the steward team decided it was convenient, or because an acquirer wanted different economics. The Constitution requires community ratification.
No equity stakes or profit participation for stewards.
Steward compensation is competitive, published, and contains no equity stakes or profit participation. We have removed the financial incentive for betrayal at the structural level.
This is not virtue. This is architecture.