Promises
People have good reasons to distrust offset apps. Here is how I handle each one.
- Never charged without your say-so
- You approve each payment yourself, on Stripe's checkout page. It's one payment for all the charities. Nothing repeats on its own: each month or year, you come back and pay again.
- Every dollar of your donation goes to the charities
- You pay My Offset once, through Stripe. I then give each charity its part through Pledge, a nonprofit giving platform, in the amounts checkout shows. Pledge records each gift in your name and emails you a receipt for it. Every month's totals are public. Where the money goes
- No cut, just costs passed on
- I don't make money on your donation. The fees are passed on at cost, each on its own line: Stripe's card fee (30¢ + 2.9%) on your payment, and Pledge's 5% technology fee and 2.9% card fee on the gifts I make through it. Paying yearly means one 30¢ fee instead of twelve. There are no tips; I pay for running the site myself.
- No cheap, unverified carbon credits
- Many cheap carbon credits have turned out not to deliver what they claimed. I give to charities chosen on evidence of impact, and I buy no carbon credits. I never say tonnes were removed, because policy work can't be measured that way.
- Every number is explained
- Each line of your footprint shows where it came from and how sure I am. You can see every factor I use and correct any estimate.
- Your data stays yours
- Linked accounts are read-only and I take only what the estimate needs. Unlink or delete everything with one click. I will never sell your data. What I read and keep
- Giving is not a substitute for cutting back
- Your summary shows the changes that would shrink your footprint most. Donations fund climate work alongside those changes, not instead of them.
- If I ever close the site
- Donations already made stay with the charities. You'll be able to download all your data, and I'll delete it after that.
Who's behind this
My Offset is made by Ian Tarter, a Master of Human-Computer Interaction student at Carnegie Mellon University. It's one person, not a company with a marketing team, and every number on this site traces back to a source you can check. iantarter.com
Questions, problems or a charge you didn't expect: iantarter.com.
See how it's calculated for every factor and source.