Stage 1: User surplus

Privacy-marketed search with lighter tracking; still a business that must fund results and experiments over time.

Open-source browser with privacy-forward defaults and no ad-tech parent; Mozilla’s funding model is fragile but the user-facing product still skews toward surplus over extraction.

A nonprofit reader mission with volunteer editors; ads are off by default and the core reading experience still prioritizes users over rent extraction.

Federated microblogging with no single owner; rough edges, but user surplus and exit to other instances is real.