We make money when we provide our users services that protect them.
It’s mostly free. Why?
For many users, Oath will be completely free-to-use. Core Oath functionality of identity verification, social media account linking, and Oath creation will remain free forever. We do this to encourage users to try out Oath and get the majority of its value without spending anything.
We will charge for value-additive services that require extra human work or compute. For example, we charge one-time fees for dispute resolution ($5), decision appeals ($10), and linking various payment methods (Venmo, CashApp, Zelle, Crypto Wallets, etc.) ($1 each). This means that unless you need our help to mediate a dispute or use a payment method other than PayPal, you won’t need to pay a cent.
What happens when we get big?
We aren’t building Oath to make the most money possible - we’re mission driven and hungry to fix a broken system. Keep in mind we have no venture capital investments or backing by choice. The founder is investing his life savings into making this work better for people not profits. Nonetheless, we need to make money to survive, pay workers, and keep our product alive without selling user data.
As a startup, our main goal is building an incredible product that collectors and trading groups love to use to protect themselves from fraud. As we grow larger, our competitive advantage will be our user’s reputation data allowing for cheaper protection services. Right now, most online businesses’ biggest cost is fraud. By having more data to predict the trustworthiness or fraud probability of users, we can build new protection features for payment, shipping, and trading at lower cost than competitors. These future protection services will be our main sources of income.
tldr; we are going to use reputation data to reduce fraud costs and pass cost savings on to our users