How the economy works
"On demand" here doesn't mean perpetual availability. The earth has limited resources — so do we. This is a demand for using and redistributing what we use, create, and share with full attention and care.
COMMONS isn't an archive. Nothing here lives forever — every cluster exists for 24 hours, then it's gone. Because of that, the money works differently too: not by counting how many times something was watched, but by what the creator decided it was worth, up front. A cluster can mix music with video, writing with slides and sound — whatever combination the artist, filmmaker, musician, writer, curator, non-profit, or institution chooses. They shape it; the viewer experiences it.
The Cluster is the Ticket
When an artist, filmmaker, musician, writer, curator, non-profit, or institution creates a cluster, they set a price for each work inside it — or mark it free. The cluster's total price is simply the sum of what's inside. A cluster with one song costs what that song is worth. A curator's cluster with three works costs more, because it holds more.
There is one gate: pay the cluster's total, and everything inside is yours to experience. No separate paywall hides behind another — what you see is what you pay for, once.
A Visit, Not a Stream
Where the Money Goes
Exact percentages are being finalized once the payment provider and tax obligations are known, so the split is accurate rather than a placeholder guess. The mechanism below won't change — only the numbers will be filled in.
Every paid transaction splits instantly — most to the cluster, the rest to the Commons. There's no pool, no monthly reconciliation, no formula weighing one cluster's attention against another's. What you pay is divided the moment you pay it.
The Commons share supports the Commons. A separate board fee funds infrastructure — and keeps opening a cluster a deliberate act, not a costless one, so shared resources aren't spent carelessly.
Free Isn't Costless
Marking a work free doesn't make it free to exist. Every free work still uses real bandwidth and real storage — real resources on a real planet. So offering something for free costs its creator a fee when the cluster is created, sized to what that particular work is likely to cost to deliver.
And every free work is capped: at most two people, ever, one click each, during its 24-hour life. Not because the fee doesn't cover more — it's a boundary, not a shortage. The internet is a utility, not an unlimited resource, and COMMONS treats it that way on purpose.
Once a free work has been seen by two people, it shows as no longer available — plainly, not silently.
Why It Works This Way
Most online experiences give you infinite scrolling. COMMONS makes money by being worth showing up for, once, fully — then letting go. This is what a sustainable one looks like.