Every gathering now helps cool the planet

Every time someone organises a yoga class, a running club session, a book club meetup, or a conference for 500 — there's an invisible carbon cost that nobody talks about. The servers that send RSVP confirmations. The push notifications pinging phones across the city. The cloud infrastructure humming 24/7 so your waitlist auto-promotes at 2am.

As a platform that powers thousands of gatherings, we've spent the past year thinking about something uncomfortable: every feature we build, every notification we send, every event page we render — consumes energy. And while we've optimised our infrastructure (Google Cloud's carbon-neutral data centres, efficient edge caching, lazy-loading everything), optimisation alone isn't enough.

Optimisation reduces harm. But the world doesn't need less harm — it needs active repair.

That's why today, Who's In is joining Stripe Climate and committing 0.5% of all revenue to fund permanent carbon removal.

There's a reason we chose Stripe Climate over planting trees or buying carbon credits. Traditional offsets have a credibility problem. Studies have shown that as many as 90% of rainforest carbon offsets from major certification programmes don't represent real carbon reductions. Trees burn down. Offset projects get double-counted. The math doesn't add up.

Carbon removal is fundamentally different. Instead of claiming to prevent future emissions (which is nearly impossible to verify), removal technologies physically extract CO₂ that's already in the atmosphere and lock it away permanently — in underground geological formations, in mineralised rock, in stable biochar.

The catch? It's expensive. Direct air capture currently costs $400–$600 per tonne of CO₂ removed. Traditional offsets cost $5–15 per tonne. That's a 40x price difference.

But this is exactly why early investment matters. Solar panels cost $76 per watt in 1977. Today they cost $0.20. The only reason that happened is because early buyers paid the premium, funded the R&D, and created the demand curve that drove costs down. Carbon removal needs the same trajectory — and it needs businesses like ours to be the early buyers.

Stripe Climate isn't a charity. It's a purchasing programme. When businesses like Who's In contribute, Stripe pools the funds and makes advance purchases from the most promising carbon removal companies in the world. These advance purchases serve two purposes: they fund the companies' operations today, and they create the demand signal that attracts further investment.

Since launching in 2020, Stripe Climate has committed over $65 million to carbon removal and funded more than 30 projects across multiple scientific approaches.

Here's something we find genuinely exciting about this model: the more organisers use Who's In, the more carbon gets removed from the atmosphere.

Think about the chain reaction. A yoga teacher starts a free weekly class on Who's In. Their students love the RSVP experience. Some of those students run their own events — a book club, a cycling group, a corporate team outing. Some of those events are paid. Some organisers upgrade to Clubs for membership management. Each of those transactions generates revenue, and 0.5% of that revenue goes directly to carbon removal.

We're not asking anyone to change their behaviour. We're not adding an opt-in donation checkbox. We're building climate action into the financial DNA of the platform. Every time you create an event, manage a club, book a studio class, or register for a conference — you're automatically contributing to carbon removal.

This is what makes community platforms uniquely powerful for climate action: network effects. The same viral growth loops that make platforms like ours grow — one organiser tells ten friends, ten friends become organisers — now also accelerate carbon removal funding.

We thought long and hard about the percentage. 0.1% felt performative — a rounding error that signals virtue without substance. 1% or more would be aspirational but unsustainable at our stage. A commitment we can't maintain is worse than no commitment at all.

0.5% is meaningful enough to fund real carbon removal, sustainable enough to maintain as we grow, and structured to scale automatically with the platform. As Who's In revenue grows, the absolute contribution grows with it. No board approval needed. No annual re-commitment. It's baked into every transaction.

For context: at current carbon removal costs of ~$500/tonne, 0.5% of a $8.25/month Clubs subscription contributes roughly $0.05/month to carbon removal. That sounds tiny in isolation. But multiply it by thousands of organisers, tens of thousands of transactions, and the compounding growth of a platform with strong network effects — and the numbers start to matter.

And here's the exciting part: as carbon removal technology matures and costs come down (following the same trajectory as solar, batteries, and computing), the same 0.5% contribution will remove more carbon each year. We're buying on the cost curve — and time is on our side.

We build tools for people who bring people together. Yoga classes in the park. Running clubs at dawn. Book clubs in living rooms. Conferences that spark careers. These gatherings — the physical act of humans occupying the same space at the same time — are among the most important things we do as a species.

Climate change threatens all of it. Extreme heat cancels outdoor events. Flooding displaces communities. Air quality warnings keep people indoors. The very things our platform exists to facilitate — people gathering in physical spaces — depend on a stable climate.

This isn't abstract corporate responsibility. It's existential self-interest. A community platform that doesn't invest in climate action is a platform that's ignoring the single biggest threat to communities everywhere.

We can't solve climate change alone. But we can make sure that every gathering on Who's In contributes to the solution rather than just the problem.

We're not asking users to donate. We're not adding a "plant a tree" checkbox to checkout. We're not buying cheap offsets and calling it a day. We're not offsetting specific events or calculating per-event carbon footprints (which would be wildly inaccurate anyway).

Instead, we're doing something simpler and more honest: taking a percentage of our revenue and putting it into the most scientifically rigorous carbon removal programme available. Stripe Climate's portfolio is vetted by a team of scientists and climate experts. The removal is permanent — not a 50-year forest that might burn down.

We're also not claiming to be carbon neutral. That phrase has become nearly meaningless. What we're claiming is much more specific: 0.5% of our revenue funds permanent carbon removal, verified by Stripe Climate, visible on our public profile.