The institutional side of porchstroll — how we're being built, how we'll be governed, and the one promise behind all of it: we don't use you.
Most platforms ask you to trust a privacy policy they can rewrite whenever it suits them. porchstroll is being built differently — as a nonprofit, structured so the promise not to exploit you is part of what the organization legally is, not just what it says. We're not incorporated yet — this page is where we'll show our work as we get there.
We're incorporating porchstroll as a nonstock nonprofit corporation in Maryland. The Articles aren't filed yet — we'll post them here once they are, and a nonprofit attorney will review what was filed. Two features of that form matter more than the label. There will be no investors and no shareholders, so no one is owed a return that could only be paid for by extracting value from the people who use the platform. And a non-distribution constraint means the organization cannot pay out profits to owners — there are none to pay. Money that comes in goes to taxes, to running porchstroll, and to paying the people who build it.
We don't claim a charitable tax exemption, and that's deliberate. It means we pay corporate income tax on any surplus, and it means we can't offer anyone a tax deduction for giving us money. We don't extract applies to the commons too: paying our share of taxes is part of how we participate, not a cost to engineer around.
Some of this is settled. Some of it we're still deciding — and we'd rather show you the reasoning than pretend every question is closed. Here's where our thinking stands today.
We're incorporating as a nonstock nonprofit, and we are not seeking 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status. The mission lock we care about comes from the corporate form itself, not from a tax classification — and a general-purpose social network is a genuinely hard case to argue as a tax-exempt charity. We'd rather make a claim we can stand behind than reach for a status we'd have to stretch to justify.
We'd revisit this if donations became a meaningful source of funding, if a major funder required it, or if this kind of voluntary transparency turned out not to be enough on its own.
We will publish a pay-ratio cap — a fixed limit on how much more the highest-paid person can earn than the lowest-paid — along with our salary bands and the founder's named salary. The exact numbers are still being finalized. The commitment to publish them, in full, is not.
Each year we will post a financial summary and an independent CPA audit, here, voluntarily — the first of them after our first full operating year. A 501(c)(3) would be required to make certain disclosures; we're choosing to show more than that, by choice rather than obligation — which we think says something a required filing can't.
porchstroll will be governed by a majority-independent board — most seats held by people who are neither staff nor the founder — and we will publish the Articles of Incorporation in full, within days of the state accepting the filing. A founder should not be able to quietly change what the organization is. The board is how we make that true.
The form is chosen — a Maryland nonstock nonprofit, with the no-investor and non-distribution constraints described above intrinsic to it. This is the foundation everything else is built on. The filing itself hasn't happened yet.
Getting incorporated and paying for real legal advice costs money, and we're earning it ourselves rather than taking it from you. We're building a paid email app — a private, no-tracking mail client that works with the accounts you already have, costs a small one-time price, and will be yours to keep once you buy it. No data collection, no ads, no AI reading your mail. It's the porchstroll philosophy in miniature, and what it earns is what we intend to put toward getting the nonprofit off the ground. It hasn't shipped yet, so it has earned nothing so far. To be clear: we are not selling anyone's data — we're selling a good, honest piece of software.
Internally we have one rule that the rest of this follows from: we don't extract. It isn't only about your data. It's about everyone in porchstroll's orbit.
From members: no surveillance, no behavioral profiling, no selling you to anyone.
From employees: living wages and real benefits, not the least we can get away with.
From vendors and the projects we depend on: partners to support, not cost centers to squeeze.
From the commons: taxes paid as a civic obligation, because we use the same roads and rules as everyone else.
porchstroll the product lives at porchstroll.com. This is where the institutional record will live — open, and kept current as we build it.
Want the human version, not the legal one? Read the founder's letter.
Funder, journalist, or just someone checking whether the structure backs the promise? Get in touch.