Our pledge

What a Public Benefit Corporation means

Most companies owe their duty to shareholders alone. A Public Benefit Corporation owes a duty to a stated public mission as well, and its directors are required to weigh that mission against profit rather than treat it as a distraction from it.

For Rhize, the stated mission is protecting digital privacy, with additional commitments to human and civil rights, conservation, and the environment. That's not a page on a website. It's the charter the company is governed by.

The practical difference is what happens under pressure. A pledge in a marketing plan can easily be dropped in a bad quarter by the people who wrote it. A commitment in the charter can't be, and that's the whole reason it's there.

What counts as profit

Half of our profit goes to the causes above — profit meaning what's left once we've covered the cost of building, running, and supporting Rhize. The other half stays in the company.

That second half buys our independence. It pays for the engineers, the servers, and the security work, and it means a subscription is the only thing we need to sell. Staying independent facilitates everything else we promise.

How you will know

Every year we publish what we made, what we gave, and where it went — named organizations and amounts, not a summary.

Rhize is built on claims you don't have to take on faith. Your private posts are unreadable to us because of cryptography, not because of a policy we wrote. The pledge is held to the same standard: if you can't check it, it isn't worth much.

Rhize is currently pre-launch — reporting will start once we have revenue.