Paid Supporter

Everything on We The Citizens is free, and stays free. A Paid Supporter is a citizen who pays a monthly amount anyway, at a number they choose themselves. It buys exactly one thing: a members-only room showing where the money went, what it bought, and what is being built next. It does not buy a louder vote and it does not buy standing.

The money path runs left to right and ends at one members-only room, while everything civic stays on the free side of the line.

What it does

An account costs nothing and opens the whole product. Becoming a Supporter is a separate, optional step, and the citizen picks how much to give from a ladder of monthly amounts — $40, $100, $200, $400, $1,000 — or types a custom amount instead. There are no named plans: the level is simply the number the citizen chose, and every supporter gets the same benefits.

Payment runs on the payment provider's own hosted page. There is no card field anywhere in the app, and no card number ever reaches the movement's servers, which hold only the provider's identifiers plus the card brand and last four digits for display.

Membership is granted by the provider's webhook, not by the browser coming back. The return trip is a URL anybody could have typed, so it only refreshes the screen; the membership turns on when the provider itself reports the charge succeeded.

A card that fails once is treated as a retry window, not as somebody leaving. Benefits stay on while the provider retries, a fix-payment line appears at the top of the page, and the membership ends only when the subscription actually ends.

Stopping is reachable from every surface that touches money: the dashboard, the statements, the payment-method page, and the bottom of every invoice. The stop page is a statement of consequences and nothing else: no further charges, benefits kept until the period already paid for runs out, account and data untouched, resume any time. No guilt copy, no retention offer, no survey wall.

Behind the door is one members-only room: where the money went, what it bought, what is being built next, and the citizen's own membership block with links to manage or stop it, so the room that takes the money is never more than two clicks from the way out.

One line governs what may ever go into it: if withholding something from a free citizen would make the product less honest, less usable, or less able to hold a politician to account, it does not belong in that room.

The goal it serves

Hosting, data pipelines and AI runs cost money, and there are only so many ways to pay for them. Advertising sells the reader's attention. A paywall sells access to the evidence. Selling citizens' data sells the citizen. Each one makes somebody other than the citizen the customer, which is the exact failure this project exists to document in money in politics.

A movement whose central charge is that money buys influence in politics cannot turn around and sell influence inside itself. So the free line is drawn around all of the civic work — reading a record, running the calculations, casting a vote, filing a proposal — because holding an official to account cannot be something a citizen has to be able to afford. What the money buys instead is transparency about the money.

There is also a plain reason the room exists. A movement that takes monthly money and shows its funders the same page as everybody else stops receiving monthly money. Publishing that reasoning is the same instinct that runs through the rest of the movement: show the mechanism, including the parts that are not flattering.

What keeps it honest

• Money is not an input to trust. Supporter status does not move the trust ladder, does not weight a vote, and does not skip an approval step. That is not left to good intentions: a test shipped with the code asserts that toggling supporter status changes no citizen's trust score.
• An admin who is not a Supporter does not get in either. No staff back door: it would make the room's own claim — this is what your money bought — impossible for a member to verify.
• The entrance is an invitation, never a wall. The Supporters Area appears in the navigation for every citizen, free or paying, never hidden and never greyed out with a padlock. A non-member's click lands on a page explaining what the room is and repeating that everything civic stays free for everyone.
• Stated limits, in this version. Refunds are not self-serve and go through support by email. The payment is not tax-deductible; this is not a charity. The room's contents are still being built, and the page says so rather than implying otherwise.
• On your own machine it can be absent entirely. An install with no payment keys configured renders the supporter pages with a plain note that payments are not configured here, and nothing else in the product notices.

Works with

• Run It On Your Own Computer — the local install is the proof that the civic product owes nothing to a payment: no account, no server, no provider wired in.
• The Public Data Repository — the evidence lives in a repository anyone can clone for free, so a membership never stands between a skeptic and the record.
• The Citizen Mining Network — supporter money pays for the pipelines and AI runs that volunteer work feeds, and that spending is one of the concrete answers the members-only room exists to give.

Where to go next

• The Movement — the charter, the four pillars, and an honest answer about what joining costs.
• Trust Scores — what a trust score answers, and why a payment never moves it.
• The core loop — the work a citizen does, all of it on the free side of the line.
• Open Data — clone the record and check any claim yourself, with no account and no payment.
• Get Started — install it or open the hosted copy, and decide about supporting later, or never.