Where Your $5 Goes: Seed's Open Accounting Explained
Most subscription services hide their financials. We publish ours. Here's exactly how every dollar of your Seed subscription is spent — from tree planting to Stripe fees.
One of the most common questions we get is simple: where does my $5 actually go? It's a fair question. Most carbon offset companies operate like black boxes — your money goes in, a vague promise of climate action comes out, and you have no idea what happened in between.
Seed is built on the opposite principle. We publish our cost structure because we believe you have the right to know exactly what your subscription funds. Here's the complete breakdown.
The $5 Breakdown
$1.00
Tree planting via 1 Click Impact (20%)
Every founding member subscription plants one tree per month, guaranteed. We work with 1 Click Impact, a verified tree planting provider. Each tree costs approximately $1, and every planting is logged with a unique transaction ID that you can verify. We select planting projects based on ecological priority — not just cost.
$0.45
Payment processing — Stripe fees (9%)
Stripe charges 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction for credit card processing. On a $5 subscription, that works out to about $0.45. This is a fixed cost we can't negotiate down — it's the industry standard for secure, PCI-compliant payment processing. Your card details never touch our servers.
$0.80
Infrastructure & hosting (16%)
Running Seed requires real infrastructure: Convex for our real-time database and serverless backend, Clerk for authentication, Vercel for web hosting, domain registration, and monitoring tools. As our subscriber count grows, per-user infrastructure costs decrease — which means a higher percentage can go toward tree planting and platform development.
$2.75
Platform development & reinvestment (55%)
This is the largest slice, and it's what makes Seed sustainable as a product. This covers ongoing development of the carbon tracking app, the mobile app (coming soon), the ecological priority algorithm, data science for better footprint estimation, and eventually passive transport detection that tracks your carbon footprint automatically.
Why This Matters
Most carbon offset companies don't tell you their margins. Some spend as little as 10-15% of your payment on actual environmental impact, with the rest going to marketing, executive compensation, and profit. We think that's wrong.
Seed is a single-founder project. There's no board of directors, no VC investors demanding 10x returns, no marketing department spending millions on ads. The team is lean by design, which means more of your subscription goes to building a better product and planting more trees.
As We Scale
These numbers will change as Seed grows. Infrastructure costs per user will decrease. We plan to increase the tree planting allocation from $1 to $1.50+ per subscriber as economies of scale kick in. The standard tier ($8/month) already plants 1-4 trees per month based on your carbon footprint. And we'll continue publishing updated cost breakdowns so you always know where your money goes.
Transparency isn't a marketing strategy for us — it's a core principle. If we can't justify a cost, we shouldn't be charging for it. Open accounting keeps us honest.
Ready to take action?
Join Seed for $5/month. We plant real trees in the ecosystems that need them most.
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