OneSub's ultimate goal is to rebuild public trust in our democracy and the journalists and newspapers that hold our politicians to account.

For that to happen everyone needs to have faith in OneSub.

So before we even get started I am going to make a couple of public pledges - to illustrate the kind of transparent and accountable organisation that OneSub expects to be.  These pledges are as follows:

OneSub is designed to give publishers a sustainable alternative to advertising revenue. 

So as OneSub matures we are going to ask you to pay a small monthly fee for using our platform.  Our expectation at this early stage is that we would like to have three options available;

• Free - a free package for people to try the platform
• Standard - probably between £6-9/month - with access to all the features OneSub offers
• Premium - probably around £15/month - with access to some publisher's premium content.

For every £1 we receive, we will keep 20p to run the business.  The other 80p will be set aside and distributed proportionally to the publications you read.

Every time our number of paying customers multiplies by ten we will give the longest-serving 10% of our customer base a free account for life.  To explain that another way;

• When we hit 10 subscribers our first customer will go free for life.
• When we hit 100 subscribers our first 10 customers will be free for life.
• When we hit 1,000 subscribers our first 100 customers will be free for life.
• ... and so on, so ...
• When we hit one million subscribers, our first 100,000 customers will be free for life.

We believe in rewarding loyalty and we particularly recognise the trust that our early customer will be putting in us to build a sustainable organisation.  We will reward that loyalty and trust.

OneSub is building a live assessment of bias across the whole spectrum of journalism.  As we grow our opinion will begin to matter more and we will be in a position of power when it comes to forming people's views on any given subject.

We believe that any organisation that gathers such power should be transparent about how it arrives at the assumptions it builds and how it conducts its operations.  Therefore we plan to build a very open organisation.

Currently we are a pre-investment, pre-revenue project but we already know that we plan to make all of our subscription revenue public via BareMetrics.  We will provide a page on this website showing our core KPIs and build a news-analysis system, which you can already see taking shape, that shows how we've come to the assessments we've come to for each publisher, topic or article.

As a OneSub user you are providing us with a lot of data about what you read.  You do this so that we can help you balance your bias.  But this data is very personal and very precious.

OneSub will never monetise your personal data  without discussing it with you first and we will never do so in any way that would allow you to be personally identified.

To explain a little further; we see three classifications of valuable data;

• Stories, articles & publishers 
  This is the data we compile around articles, topics and publications. We might sell this to organisation who would find it valuable but it has no relationship to any subscribers or users - it's just information about the stuff that we've read.
  
  
• Bulk, homogenised trends 
  This is the data we might compile around large groups of people and their reading habits. We might sell this or provide it to universities and researchers in time. So for now what we will promise is that we will not share this without consulting you and we will always leave an option to keep your data out of the aggregate data set if you're uncomfortable.  This data will not highlight individuals but we recognise there is always a risk.
  
  
• Your personal behaviour
  This is the data based around what you, as an individual, have read.  Collecting this data enables us to show you your bias and to make suggestions about what else you should read - which is kinda the whole point of the OneSub platform.  Nevertheless it is extremely personal data.  Therefore we can say with maximum clarity we will never sell this data or allow it to be accessed or used in anyway that's not directly related to providing you the service you've asked for -- and should you wish us to delete this data we will always ensure that it's quick and easy to do.

Ultimately, OneSub is not here to gather and sell your data.  We will ask you to pay upfront for our service and we will always be transparent about where that money goes.  Unlike many free services - particularly social media platforms and search engines - you are not our product.

OneSub exists because we believe our democracy is being undermined by the way we discover and pay for our news and all of the insidious problems that come with this change.

We are going to solve this problem by inspiring rational debate about the real issues facing society.

That rational debate happens when more of us are able to learn about our own biases and when journalists and newspapers have a sustainable income stream that rewards quality of argument of perspective rather than our current system which rewards sensationalism, extremism and page-views.

OneSub will always stand for inspiring rational, transparent debate.  We pledge that will not allow this mission to be subverted by anyone as we grow and we will not allow ourselves to get distracted from this mission.