The standard
This is the site's anchor page, and the reason everything lives here rather than on a service brand: the recommended subscription model, published as a standard a company can adopt this week, with the law-shaped version on /standard/proposal/ as a later artefact for consumer groups and committees.
That sentence does the work of the whole standard. It stays a tagline rather than a name — the abbreviation trap is real (Discount-Not-Rent → DNR was considered and rejected), so it is repeated in full wherever the site states its scope.
The five clauses
Each one a company either meets or does not, and each observable from outside — the property that makes this a standard rather than a pledge. A dated test somebody else can repeat is evidence; an assertion is marketing. A code of conduct whose clauses cannot be checked is the second thing.
| # | Clause | Observable how |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | We can tell you how much you used it | Ask, and see whether a real answer comes back. |
| 2 | We tell you without you having to ask | Do usage summaries arrive unprompted? |
| 3 | Leaving is as easy as joining, by the same route | Testable in a browser, without the company's cooperation. The measurement method. |
| 4 | If you stop using it, we tell you before we charge you again | Observable over one renewal cycle. |
| 5 | We do not charge for a period you could not have used | Outages, suspensions, lockouts. |
The conformance route
The standard ships in three layers:
The standard
The five clauses above, adoptable unilaterally, with a public adopters list.
The conformance route
How a company declares adoption: a published policy page, which the register accepts as an answer — the reflexivity fix that turns answering into a one-time cost rather than a per-request one. How the register treats a policy page →
The draft law
The same five clauses re-expressed as obligations, explicitly labelled a proposal, mapped against the spring-2027 regime. Read the proposal →
Adopters
The maturity model
Four axes, one of which needs no cooperation from anybody:
| Axis | The question | Observed how |
|---|---|---|
| Knows | Can they tell you what you used? | Ask |
| Tells | Do they tell you before charging you again? | Watch one renewal cycle |
| Speed | Days from asking to a substantive answer | Measured |
| Exit | Is leaving as easy as joining, by the same route? | A browser, no contact required |
Exit is built first — click counts and routes for fifty companies, dated, method published so anyone can re-run it. It is measured rather than reported, so no company can decline to participate in it: the register's credibility deposit, a complete artefact before a single letter is sent. The method, on /exit/ →
What the standard is not
- Not a scoreboard — no scores exist anywhere in this design.
- Not a pledge — every clause is externally checkable.
- Not the 2027 regime restated — three of the five clauses go beyond it, and that delta is the legislative argument on the proposal page.
- Not dependent on anyone's cooperation to start — clause 3 and the exit axis are measurable today, unilaterally.