Initiative

A bid on Outbid Green is a number of trees, and that same number is handed to the people who plant them. We watched paid leaderboards sell attention and keep every cent of it, and the only thing that ever grew was the people running them. If money is going to decide who sits at the top, something other than the house should come out of it.

• A bid is trees, never dollars

  One tree costs $5 and that is the whole price list. You choose a number of trees, the board stores that number, and the number you bid is the number that goes to the planting. There is no percentage split.

• Someone with a shovel does the planting

  The trees are passed on to a verified reforestation partner who plants and looks after them. We run a leaderboard, not a nursery, so the planting is done by people whose whole job it is.

• The grove is the receipt for all of it

  The 3D grove on the board draws one block for every tree bid on this site, with nothing sampled away and nothing rounded up for the picture. If the grove grew, so did the order.

• Your own count follows your name

  Every cleared bid returns a Stripe receipt with the trees it is planting and the rank it bought. Totals only ever go up, so the trees under your listing only ever accumulate.

• Outbid and you keep your trees

  Losing a spot costs you the rank, never the planting. The tree count next to your name stays there for good, and someone passing you does not undo a single one of them.

• Open source, so the count is checkable

  The board is open source. The code that ranks the listings, converts a bid into trees and draws the grove is public, so nobody has to take the number on this page on faith.

• Planted where they do the most good

  The partner picks the sites, the species and the season, because a tree in the wrong place is a photograph rather than a forest. We hand over the count and stay out of the agronomy.