Free apps sell your attention. We're asking 1,000 people to pay for an internet that doesn't.

There is a simple rule underneath almost every app on your phone: it is built to please whoever pays for it. When advertisers pay, the product is your attention, and the app's job is to collect as much of it as possible. That one fact explains the endless feed, the autoplay, the notification that pulls you back, and the strange feeling of closing an app knowing less than when you opened it.

None of this needs a villain. A team paid by attention will, over time, build whatever holds attention best. Outrage holds it. Bots and fake engagement inflate it cheaply. Real conversation, deep reading and actually finishing something tend to end the session, so they quietly lose.

The old line is blunt because it is accurate. A free product still has a price; you just pay it in time, focus and data, and you don't get to see the bill. MindsNet is rebuilding the internet around your mind, one piece at a time: learning, your feed, finding real people, your own data, and exploring the open web. None of those pieces can be honest if the business underneath them depends on keeping you scrolling.

So we are choosing a different customer. MindsNet is funded by its members. One membership, $20 a month, opens every app. No ads, no attention traps, no data sold. When the people using MindsNet are the people paying for it, the only way for us to do well is for you to leave sharper than you came.

Before the monthly plan, we are opening 1,000 lifetime memberships, and we are not setting the price. You are. Founding 1000 runs from November 1 to December 31, 2026, and the founders are seated on January 1: a new year, and a new internet. You bid what an internet built for your mind is worth to you, from $50. The 1,000 highest paid bids keep every MindsNet app for life, including every app we build next.

We chose an open bid for three reasons. It lets the people who care most about this decide what it is worth, instead of us guessing. It funds the next pieces of MindsNet from the people who will use them, not from investors who would want a feed. And it is honest in public: the page counts every paid bid and every person in, live, while each bid's amount stays private to the person who made it.

A good internet should leave a person with more agency than they brought to it. Paying for it is how you make sure it stays that way.

There is one window. It won't be extended and it won't run again. If fewer than 1,000 people bid, every paid bid wins and the empty spots stay empty, because selling them cheaper later would be unfair to the people who bid more.

Founding 1000 is for people who would rather meet one real person than collect a thousand reactions, who would rather understand something than be kept busy, and who are tired of an internet that treats their mind as inventory. If that is you, this is your chance to fund the version of the internet you actually want, at the price you think it deserves.