The bill exists
Every AI answer costs real money the moment it is generated. Someone pays it.
Products that don’t say who usually mean you, later — a price rise, a squeezed free tier, a quiet change to what “unlimited” meant. We’d rather write the arithmetic down now, while it’s boring, than explain it during a pricing announcement.
There are ads in the myOrbit app. This is the case for them, and the limits we put on them.
Who actually pays for the free floor
Our plans page says “Stay Free Forever” — not free trial, which is a countdown wearing a nicer word. A floor that permanent has to be funded by someone who isn’t standing on it.
The design has two funders. Subscribers, who pay for comfort and speed. And advertisers, who pay for attention that members choose to give. Between them, a person with no card on file gets the same AI intelligence as everyone else — our plans page is explicit that the intelligence does not change by tier. What upgrading buys is fewer ads, priority, and a monthly cushion so you don’t have to think about earning.
One honest correction to that picture, because it’s the state of things rather than the plan: the advertiser half is barely running. We are pre-launch, third-party ad demand is close to nothing, and most of what you see in the app today is our own house creative filling the slot. So right now the free floor is carried by subscribers and by us. Ads are how that stops being true — not how it currently works.
The ad is a transaction, and you’re a party to it
Here is the part that makes ads sit differently here.
Watch a rewarded ad and you are credited Nuggets — the platform’s currency — into your earned balance. Earned Nuggets don’t expire. There’s a daily limit on how many rewarded ads count, because an economy with no cap is a farm.
What we are not going to tell you is exactly how many Nuggets one ad is worth, and the reason is the sort of thing companies usually keep indoors. The crediting runs through more than one path in our own systems, and those paths do not currently agree on the number. Until they do, any figure we printed here would be one we’d have to correct later, so we are printing none — and the earning table on plans deliberately leaves rewarded ads out for the same reason, rather than publishing an average and calling it a rate. Everything else you can earn from is listed there, each with its cap.
The conventional arrangement is that attention flows one way and revenue flows the other. Ours pays you, in the same currency you spend on the things you make here. It is not a cash dividend and we won’t dress it up as one — but it is your side of the transaction, and unlike most of what’s described here, it is running in the app today. The philosophy behind it is in why an economy, not a paywall.
What an advertiser learns about you
Less than you’d assume, and we publish the inventory.
Third-party ads inside the app are served through Google AdMob — our only advertising partner. No exchanges, no mediation networks, no long tail of intermediaries you’d have to audit one by one. When you’re served a personalized ad, AdMob receives your device’s advertising identifier, an approximate location derived from your IP, and your interactions with the ad. House ads — currently most of them — involve no ad network at all.
It does not receive your messages, your contacts, your precise GPS coordinates, your phone number, or your email address. Your conversations are not ad inventory.
You can turn personalization off — iOS tracking settings, Android ad settings, or an email to us, which our privacy policy commits to honouring. And that policy is equally blunt about the limit of that choice: if you opt out, you will still see ads. They’ll be chosen without a behavioral profile. Opting out reduces targeting; it does not remove advertising. We put that sentence in the policy rather than let you discover it.
The same policy goes further and calls passing an advertising identifier to an ad network what California law calls it — sharing for cross-context behavioral advertising — even though no money changes hands for your data. We don’t sell personal information, and we’re not going to hide behind the narrow version of that promise.
Creators, and the honest status
The other reason ads exist is that a creator’s audience should be worth something to the creator.
The model is built and its arithmetic is deliberately conservative: creators are paid a rank-based share of advertising revenue, and only of revenue that has been reconciled against what the ad network actually paid. The invariant in our own code is that every real dollar received is either attributed or reported as unattributed — never invented. You can only pay out money that actually arrived.
That last constraint is doing real work right now, so here is the status without a marketing coat of paint: ad-revenue payouts to creators are not running yet. The ledger, the share rules, and the reconciliation path exist; the network revenue callbacks that confirm the money have not shipped, and until they do, revenue is carried as estimated and nothing is paid from it. We would rather hold payouts than pay out of numbers we haven’t confirmed.
When it runs, we’ll say so here. The creators page sets out the terms rather than a live status — what you keep when you monetize, and the ownership commitments underneath it — and it is written conditionally on purpose, because that is the honest tense for it today.
Ads as a floor, not a ceiling
A last point about direction, because “why are there ads” is usually really “how bad will this get?”
Ads here are sized to fund a free floor, not to maximize a number. Paid tiers reduce them and the top tier removes them entirely, which means our incentive is not to make the free experience unbearable — an ad load engineered as a punishment is just a paywall that lies about being one. The free member is a full member: same intelligence, same rooms, same ability to earn.
We show ads because a genuinely free floor has to be paid for by somebody, and we’d rather it be an advertiser buying attention you chose to give — and got paid for — than a card number you were quietly required to hand over.