How we make money

Last updated: TODO — date on ship

Subscriptions. That's the whole model.

Aligned is free during early access. When paid plans arrive, the price will be on the Pricing page in plain numbers, and your price never goes up while you're subscribed. No venture capital. No outside investors. No board to answer to.

You should know how a compatibility app makes money before you tell it how you love — because the business model is the product.

An app that earns from your attention has to hold your attention. Every notification, every streak, every paywalled “see who liked you” is a business model talking. Aligned earns money one way: you pay for it, for as long as you find it useful. If it works, you'll stop finding it useful and you'll cancel — and that's survivable, because the supply of people who want to date deliberately doesn't run out.

We don't have to keep you. That's the whole difference.

What we'll never do

1. Sell, rent, or share your personal information.

   We have no advertising business and no data-broker relationships. There's nothing to opt out of, because there's nothing happening.

2. Run ads.

   No ads means no ad pixels, no third-party trackers, no cross-site anything. Open your browser's network tab and check.

3. Charge you to fix a mistake.

   No paying to undo. No paying to see something you'd already unlocked. Apps that monetize your fumbles are betting against you.

4. Send you a notification engineered to pull you back.

   You'll hear from us when something you asked about actually happened — never because a growth dashboard went quiet.

5. Manufacture urgency.

   No countdown timers. No “only 3 left.” No invented scarcity. If we show you a number, it's real.

6. Make leaving hard.

   Cancelling is one click — no retention wall, no guilt screen, no phone call. Deleting your account is the same, and it's permanent.

And if we're ever bought

Most companies bury this in clause 12 and hope you don't read it. Here it is in plain sight, because it's the question you should actually be asking.

We can't promise a bankruptcy court will honour a privacy policy. No company can — and any company that tells you otherwise is misleading you. A judge said exactly that, last year, about the most sensitive dataset in the country. We're not going to pretend we found a loophole nobody else has.

What we can do, we commit to:

1. We will not sign a deal that doesn't require the acquirer to be bound, in writing, by this policy — for every piece of data collected before the transaction.

2. Any materially different use of your existing data requires your opt-in. Not an opt-out. Not a thirty-day window where silence counts as yes.

3. At least 30 days' notice, and one-click export and permanent deletion, before any change of ownership takes effect. You get to leave with your data, and take it out of ours, before anything happens.

4. We hold less, and we delete faster. The only data that genuinely cannot be sold, subpoenaed, or handed to a new owner is data we never kept.

If any of this ever has to change, it changes here first — dated, before it takes effect, not after. This page's history is part of the promise.

What we store, and how to take it with you or destroy it, is on Your data.