the money page

No ads means someone
has to pay. here's exactly
who, and how.

Every free-forever app is paid for by someone. Usually it's you, quietly, with your attention and your data. We'd rather just show you the receipts.

the thesis

You are not the product.

The old deal

You get a “free” account. They get your scroll history, your location, your contacts, your face, and a model of exactly which insecurity sells you a watch. The product was never the app. The product was you, in a spreadsheet, on sale.

Our deal

You get the app. We get paid by the people who want extra shine — glass themes, crack flourishes, a fancier profile. No auction runs in the background while you read your friends. Nobody's bidding on your attention. There's nothing to bid on.

If you're not paying, and there are no ads, the math has to close somewhere honest. For us, it closes out in the open.

the model

Free where it counts. Paid where it's pretty.

always free

The whole network

Posting, following, messaging, groups, the full feed. The core of wack. is free forever — not free-for-now, not free-with-an-asterisk. The part that makes it a social network is never the part you pay for.

optional

wack. supporter

A few dollars a month, entirely optional, for people who want to keep the lights on. In return: cosmetics. Glass themes, animated crack flourishes, a fancier profile, an early-access lane for new features. Vanity, sold honestly.

never

The things we won't do

No ads. No selling your data. No paywalling your own friends. No “pay to be seen by people who already follow you.” If a feature only makes money by making the app worse, it's not a feature. It's a trap.

the actual numbers

Beta-stage, and a little nervous about it.

We're small. These are real figures from a real, early network, rounded to the nearest honest digit. We'll keep them updated even when they're unflattering — especiallywhen they're unflattering.

18,420

members, and counting

$4,100

monthly server & bandwidth bill

1,260

supporters keeping us afloat

~9 months

runway at the current burn

Translation: supporter revenue currently covers the servers with a little left over for coffee. Growth makes the bill bigger and the runway shorter — so if you want this to exist in a year, the supporter button is the honest lever. No guilt. Just arithmetic.

where it goes

What your money pays for. (Not a yacht.)

~46%

Servers & storage

The boring boxes that hold your posts, your messages, and that photo you'll never delete. They cost money whether anyone's looking or not.

~22%

Bandwidth

Every image, every scroll, every loaded thread travels over a wire we rent by the gigabyte. The more you use wack., the more this line grows. We consider that a good problem.

~32%

Development

The people who build the thing, fix the thing, and answer your support email at an hour they'd rather not. Modest salaries. No private islands. Genuinely no yacht.

the candid bit

Plenty of nicer apps died broke.

We've all watched it happen. A beautiful, ad-free, principled network shows up, everyone loves it, nobody pays for it, and one quiet Tuesday it posts a goodbye note and turns off the lights.

We don't want to be a goodbye note. So we're doing the unglamorous thing: charging a fair price to the people who can spare it, keeping the core free for everyone, and telling you the real numbers before you have to find out the hard way. Idealism is lovely. It just doesn't pay the bandwidth bill.

The plan isn't to get rich. The plan is to still be here next year — and the year after that.

Pay nothing. Or pay us, not an ad auction.

Join free in about a minute. Become a supporter whenever you feel like it — or never, and use the whole thing anyway. Both are honest answers.

No ads. No trackers. No data sale. No kidding.