Where Your Membership Fee Actually Goes

Start with where it does not go.

There is no advertising revenue in this business, and no sale of user data to advertisers or third parties. Everything the company runs on comes from memberships. That has consequences beyond the balance sheet: there is no ad sales team whose targets shape the product, no data partnership that quietly justifies collecting more than we need, and no engagement metric tied to impressions. When the member is the only customer, there is no second customer with conflicting interests.

Ten percent goes to charity, calculated on revenue.

The word before the percentage is the part that matters. Profit is a number a company substantially controls. Costs, salaries and reinvestment all come off first, which is why a pledge of ten percent of profit can honestly resolve to zero in a year the company chooses to reinvest. Revenue is the top line, before any of that discretion applies.

Patagonia established this distinction as the serious version of corporate giving. Since 2002 it has committed 1 percent of sales, explicitly not profits, through 1% for the Planet, and the organisation certifies members’ donations so the claim cannot function as marketing on its own. More than 500 million dollars has been certified through it. Our commitment is 5 to 10 percent of revenue, on the same top-line basis.

The largest remaining share goes back into the platform.

After that, the biggest single portion of what comes in is spent building and improving the product: infrastructure, security, the AI tools, the features, and the ongoing work of fixing what members tell us is broken. For a company at our stage this is not a nice-to-have line item. A membership product that stops improving stops being worth the membership, and the market punishes that faster than it punishes almost anything else.