BACKPAY · a data union
THE UNION · LIVE

Our tools logged $0 of our usage.

Every AI coding tool harvests this exact telemetry, ships it home, and sells the story — to investors, to competitors, to anyone but you. Backpay flips the meter: the same metadata, collectively bargained. 50% of every contract flows back to the people generating the data. This is the union's tab — in the open.

0 tokens through the meter · — members
the union's model mix · counters never content · k≥5

The whole constitution

i.
Counters, never content. The collector's schema has no field for prompts, paths or names — it cannot leak what it cannot hold.
ii.
Nothing leaves unseen. preview prints every byte before anything is sent. The collector is open source, small enough to read in one coffee.
iii.
No one is ever the product alone. No data cell covering fewer than five members is published or sold. Individual rows: never, at any price.
iv.
The ledger is open — the pool is on-chain. Half of every euro back, pro-rata by days, routed to a public Bitcoin address you can audit. €0.00 today, honestly — or this is just another harvester with better fonts.
v.
Paid in money nobody can freeze. Default payout rail: Bitcoin Lightning. Your balance is yours, not a platform's hostage.
MEMBER LEDGER — accrued to members€0.00
contracts sold0
meter statusON — counting since day one

The first hundred carry founding weight.

One command, once — the meter then runs itself (a ~1-second daily tick, no daemon). It shows you every byte and asks before sending anything. No email, no signup, no spam — ever. Read the full manifesto →

npx backpay

1 member(s) and counting · founding weight for the first 100

Questions, answered straight

What is Backpay?
An open-source data union for AI dev tools. Members run a tiny meter that reads the usage logs their AI coding tools already write locally and submits day-level counters only. The data union sells k-anonymous aggregates — the live index of which AI tools are actually winning — and 50% of every contract flows back to members, pro-rata by days contributed.
Doesn't OpenRouter already publish this?
OpenRouter ranks models flowing through its own gateway — but Claude Code, Cursor and Copilot call their providers directly and never touch it, so it's blind to the tool war. Backpay measures tools from each dev's local logs, across every tool, plus the per-dev switching and churn no single gateway can see. Different layer — and it pays the devs nothing.
Can it read my prompts or code?
No — structurally. The payload schema has no field for prompts, file paths, repo names or code, so they cannot be sent. Tool and model names come from a fixed vocabulary; strings from your logs are never copied. preview prints every byte before anything leaves your machine. Don't trust — verify: the whole meter is one file — read collect.js (the same code that ships on npm).
How do I get paid?
50% of every revenue contract accrues to members, pro-rata by days of data contributed — visible from day one via status, before payouts even open. Payout rail: Bitcoin Lightning, money nobody can freeze — the plan is automatic payout to an address you control (no wallet? Wallet of Satoshi gives you a Bitcoin Lightning address in seconds). One human, one payout: Sybil is gated at payout via GitHub OAuth, never at accrual.
How do I join?
Run npx backpay. It reads your local logs, shows the complete payload, and asks consent before sending anything. You become member №N — the first 100 carry permanent founding weight.
How do I leave?
One command: npx backpay stop. Removes the daily cron line, deletes the local config. Server-side erasure of your rows is one email. The whole privacy policy, in plain language →