Web Wizards Is Now a Stripe Climate Member
A share of what we earn now goes to permanent carbon removal. Here is what that actually funds, why a four-person studio in Singapore bothered, and - as with every badge we put on this site - what it does not claim.
What Stripe Climate is
Stripe Climate lets a business direct a fraction of its revenue to carbon removal. The money is pooled with every other member’s and spent by Stripe’s own science team on removal projects they have assessed - so a studio our size ends up funding work it could never have sourced, diligenced or contracted on its own.
The part that made us pay attention is the word permanent. Stripe Climate buys carbon removal, not the familiar bundle of offsets. The distinction is not marketing. An offset usually pays someone not to emit, or pays for something that stores carbon for as long as it stays standing and unburnt. Removal pulls carbon that is already in the atmosphere back out and puts it somewhere it is meant to stay for centuries - mineralised into rock, locked into deep geological storage, buried as treated biomass.
That kind of removal is, today, expensive and small-scale. It is expensive because it is early, and it is early partly because nobody was buying. Stripe’s argument - and the reason it also helped start Frontier, an advance market commitment where large buyers pre-commit to purchase future removal - is that a guaranteed buyer is what lets a technology get cheap enough to matter. Members are buying tonnes, but the thing they are really paying for is the demand signal.
Why we joined
Software is not weightlessEvery system we hand over runs on someone’s hardware, in someone’s data centre, drawing power for years after the invoice is settled. The industry talks about “the cloud” as if it were made of nothing. It is made of electricity.
We would rather buy the hard thingCheap offsets would have cost us less and looked the same in a footer. Permanent removal costs considerably more per tonne, which is precisely why it needs buyers who are not optimising for the cheapest possible claim.
It is proportionate to our sizeA percentage of revenue scales with the business. It commits us on the quiet months as well as the good ones, and it does not require a sustainability department to administer.
It is checkableThe contribution is recorded on a page Stripe hosts, not on one we control. We prefer credentials that someone else can verify - the same reason we wrote up our Google Cloud Partner Advantage membership rather than simply displaying the logo.
What it changes for our clients
Nothing about your build, your price or your timeline. We want to be unambiguous about that, because “green software vendor” is the sort of phrase that starts to sound like a billable line item. It is not one. The contribution comes out of our margin.
What it may change is a question some of our clients are now being asked by their own customers and auditors - who they buy software from, and whether those vendors have anything to say about climate beyond a statement of intent. If that question reaches you, the answer for this vendor is a membership with a public ledger behind it, and this article explaining exactly how little and how much it means.
What this is not. This is not a claim that Web Wizards is carbon neutral, net zero, or that the systems we build are climate neutral. We have not measured our full operational footprint and we are not going to imply that a revenue-share contribution cancels it out. It is a contribution to permanent carbon removal, recorded publicly, and that is the whole of the claim.
The part that is actually engineering
- Pages that do less work - the same discipline that makes a site fast makes it cheaper to serve. Shipping less JavaScript, splitting what remains, and not loading a video nobody scrolled to are decisions we already argue for on performance grounds; the energy they save is the same saving, counted differently.
- Workloads that sleep - most internal platforms are busy for eight hours and idle for sixteen. Scheduled jobs, scale-to-zero services and caches that actually hit mean the machine is not spinning through the night for nobody.
- Models called deliberately - an AI feature that re-runs inference on every keystroke costs real power. Retrieval over a narrow index, cached embeddings and a smaller model where a smaller model suffices are ordinary engineering choices with an energy bill attached.
- Systems you own - a platform that gets replaced every two years is rebuilt every two years. Building something a client can maintain and extend is, among other things, the longest-lived efficiency decision in the list.
Where to check it
Stripe publishes a page for each member showing what their contributions have funded. Ours is public, and we would rather point at it than paraphrase it:
See our Stripe Climate contributions →
The logo now sits in the navigation bar at the top of every page on this site, next to our Google Cloud credential, and it links back here. A badge that does not explain itself is decoration; this one has somewhere to go.
Building something that has to run for years?
Most of the climate conversation in software happens at the scale of hyperscalers, which is not much help if you are a Singapore business trying to get off spreadsheets. The useful version is smaller and duller: build the thing once, make it efficient, keep it running, and pay for the removal your work implies. Tell us what has to be true and we will tell you what it takes to build.