What We Guarantee

Promises you can verify in the code. If we break any, you can see it and leave.

Revenue

Guarantee: 0% platform fee on fan payments. The only deduction is the payment processor’s fee (~3%).

No platform percentage cut, ever.
No transaction fees, payout fees, or skimming.
This is the model, not a promotional rate.

Your $16-$60/month covers platform access. Fan revenue is untouched.

Data Export

Guarantee: Full export available at any time, completing within minutes.

Exports include:

All uploaded content in the same quality served on the platform (if the platform stores your file as-is, you get the original; if any processing occurs, you get the served version; always keep your own lossless backups of source files)
Complete metadata and organization structure
Fan/subscriber list (emails, contact info when fans consent to share)
Complete transaction and payment history

Format: Original files, JSON metadata, CSV transactions.

Cancellation

Guarantee: Month-to-month. Cancel anytime, effective immediately.

Cancellation is a single button (“Pause Creator Account”) in your account settings.
No exit fees, no retention flows, no dark patterns.
Export and download remain available through the end of your billing period.
After cancellation, your existing content stays published for 30 days. After that, items are hidden (not deleted). Resubscribing to any tier automatically restores all hidden items.

Audience Ownership

Guarantee: Creators own their fan relationships.

At every checkout, fans choose whether to share their email with you (opt-in per transaction). If a fan shares, their email appears in your contact list and exports. If they don’t, you see the transaction but not their identity. Fans who don’t share can still reach you through the platform. See Contact Sharing for full details.

If you leave, your fan contact list is yours (export it anytime). See Buyer Access below for purchased content.

Buyer Access

Guarantee: If a creator deletes their account, fans retain access to content for 90 days.

One-time purchases: Items remain downloadable for 90 days after the creator leaves.
Membership content: Fans with active memberships retain access during the same 90-day grace period. Memberships are not billed during this period.
After 90 days, content is removed from our servers.
Buyers are notified by email when the grace period begins so they can download their files.
Transaction records are preserved indefinitely (receipts remain valid).

This gives fans a reasonable window to retrieve content they paid for while allowing creators to fully remove their data.

Source Transparency

Guarantee: Source code is publicly available for review.

Every claim in this document is verifiable in the code.
Security and privacy practices are auditable.

Shutdown Protocol

Guarantee: If Makenot.work shuts down, the following process applies:

90-day advance notice minimum before any service interruption.
Full export access maintained for the entire 90-day notice period.
Data preservation: all content remains accessible for download.
Fan notification: we help communicate the transition to your audience.
Source code remains available for reference.

What it costs to keep the lights on during shutdown: Fixed costs are ~$580/month; a full 90-day wind-down costs under $2,000 in hosting. Fan payments go directly to creator-controlled Stripe accounts, so there are no pending payouts to settle on our side. We don’t depend on external funding to keep operating, and there are no investors or creditors who could force an early shutdown.

Continuity

What happens if the founder is incapacitated?

Makenot.work is currently a one-person operation. Here is what protects you if something happens to the founder:

Your money is safe. Fan payments go directly to your Stripe account. There is no platform balance to recover.
Your data is exportable now. Don’t wait for an emergency. Export regularly. Your content, metadata, transactions, and contact list are always available for download.
The source code is public. The complete codebase is available under the PolyForm Noncommercial license. Anyone can inspect, fork, or reference it.
Infrastructure is simple. One server, one database, one object storage bucket. A technically competent person could keep it running or wind it down.
Continuous backups exist offsite. Daily database dumps are replicated to a separate machine. WAL (write-ahead log) continuous archiving caps potential data loss at ~5 minutes and enables point-in-time recovery.

The honest answer: if the founder disappeared, the server would continue running (automatic restarts, health monitoring), but no one would respond to issues. With ~$580/month in hosting costs and years of runway prepaid, the platform would remain online for months. Before any service interruption, creators would have time to export, and fan payments would still be in their Stripe accounts regardless.

Reducing this risk is the top hiring priority once revenue covers operating costs.

Price Stability

Guarantee: No price increases without:

90 days advance notice.
Published explanation of the change.
Grandfathering of existing creators at their current rate for at least 12 months.

No investor pressure demanding revenue growth. Price changes would only happen if infrastructure costs change dramatically.

Advertising

Guarantee: We will never place ads on the platform. Your pages show your content. Fans see what they came for.

Creators are free to include sponsored segments, affiliate links, or similar arrangements in their own content. What we guarantee is that Makenot.work will never insert, overlay, or inject advertising into your pages or your fans’ experience.

Data Collection

Guarantee: We collect only what we need to operate:

Account information you provide
Content you upload
Transactions you conduct

No browsing profiles. No behavioral tracking. No selling data. Verifiable in the source code; see the Privacy Policy for the full list of data categories.

Availability

Guarantee: We target 99.5% uptime (roughly 44 hours of downtime per year or less).

Current uptime published live at makenot.work/health, including 24-hour and 7-day percentages.
Monitored by two independent systems: an internal background monitor with email alerts, and an external monitor (PoM) on separate infrastructure.
Automatic restart within seconds on crash.
Daily database backups replicated to a separate machine, with continuous WAL archiving for point-in-time recovery.

As a single-server, single-operator platform, we cannot yet guarantee the sub-9-hours-per-year downtime that 99.9% requires; that needs redundancy or 24/7 on-call coverage. See Planned Guarantees below for our path to 99.9%.

Enforcement

If you think we’ve broken any of these:

Check the code. Technical claims are verifiable in the public codebase.
Check the docs. This document is versioned and timestamped.
Leave. Export your data, take your audience, and cancel. We’d rather you be able to leave than feel trapped.

Planned Guarantees

Commitments we are building toward. Not yet active; will become enforceable once the alpha period ends.

Content Archive

Planned, not yet implemented. We intend to build this before leaving beta.

Any content that has existed on the platform for 12 months or more would remain hosted and accessible to fans even if the creator stops paying for their account.

Archived content stays live at its original URLs.
Fans who purchased the content retain access.
The creator cannot upload new content without reactivating their membership.
The creator can still export their data and delete their account at any time.

99.9% Availability

One of our targets for officially leaving beta.

Reaching 99.9% requires database replication, zero-downtime deployments, and either a second operator or automated failover. We will not claim 99.9% until we can sustain it consistently.

Moderation Appeals

As a one-person operation, we cannot yet implement independent appeal review. Until we have the team to support it, moderation decisions are made directly and in good faith.

If we moderate content or take action on an account:

Clear written explanation of the policy violated.
Opportunity to appeal, reviewed by someone other than the original decision-maker.
Data export access preserved even during suspension (excluding content we cannot legally host).