What "1% for the Planet" Actually Means (and What It Doesn't)
There's a badge in our footer that says we contribute 1% of revenue to carbon removal through Stripe Climate. Badges like that are everywhere, and most companies hope you'll read them quickly and feel vaguely good. We'd rather you understand exactly what ours means. A few of the details cut against us.
The mechanics, plainly
Stripe Climate takes 1% of our revenue, automatically, off the top, and pools it with contributions from thousands of other businesses. That pool, managed through Frontier, an advance market commitment, funds early-stage carbon removal: direct air capture, enhanced weathering, ocean-based approaches, and other technologies that physically pull CO2 out of the atmosphere and store it durably. The pooling matters. Our individual contribution is small, but aggregated purchasing gives nascent removal companies the demand signal they need to scale. That's the actual theory of impact: not that our dollars remove much carbon today, but that guaranteed early demand helps build an industry the planet will need at massive scale.
Removal is not offsetting, and the difference is the whole point
Most corporate climate badges are built on offsets: paying to prevent emissions that would supposedly have happened elsewhere, most commonly by protecting forests or funding cleaner infrastructure. Offsets have a rough track record. Investigations have found credits based on deforestation that was never going to happen, projects that would have existed anyway, and reversals where protected carbon later burned or was logged. The accounting question, "what would have happened without this payment," is genuinely unanswerable, and an unanswerable question is a great place to hide inflated claims.
Removal makes a different, harder claim: this specific quantity of CO2 was captured and stored. It's measurable in a way avoidance never can be. The trade-off is cost. Removal currently runs orders of magnitude more expensive per ton than cheap offsets, which is exactly why cheap offsets dominate corporate marketing, and why funding removal at today's prices is closer to R&D philanthropy than to neutralizing a footprint.
What our badge does not mean
It does not mean TailorFit is carbon neutral, and we've never claimed it. One percent of a small company's revenue does not remove anywhere near the emissions embedded in our operations and the AI inference upstream of us. At current removal prices, the tons our contribution buys are modest. It also does not offset anything in the accounting sense. We're not purchasing credits against a measured footprint, partly because, as we've written elsewhere, a company our size cannot yet credibly measure that footprint. The badge means exactly this: a fixed, automatic slice of every dollar we earn goes to scaling permanent carbon removal, forever, growing as we grow.
How to read anyone's green badge, including ours
Four questions separate substance from decoration. Is it removal or avoidance? Is the amount a defined, automatic commitment or a discretionary donation with a press release? Does the company claim "neutrality," which should prompt you to ask for the methodology, or does it claim a contribution, which is at least checkable? And does the company acknowledge what it doesn't know about its own footprint? Companies that can answer the fourth question confidently are rare. The confident ones are usually wrong.
We chose this structure because it's the most defensible thing a company our size can do: real money, automatic, aimed at the durable end of the market, with no neutrality theater on top. When we're large enough to measure properly and buy removal against actual measured tons, we intend to. Until then, the badge means what this post says, no more. We'd rather it mean something small and true than something large and unverifiable.