Five questions any company should be able to answer
Sponsored. I run both realprosperity.org and ReadingPub, so this is me advertising my own site on my own site.
Most of what we use online is built to be hard to leave, hard to price and hard to see into. That isn't an accident, and it doesn't have to stay that way. Real Prosperity is my attempt to write down what the other way looks like, in terms plain enough that anyone can check a company against it.
It comes down to five questions:
- Can a customer export everything they put in, in a format another tool can read, without asking anyone?
- Does the price page say what one unit costs and what a unit is?
- Is there a public list of every piece of data the product collects, and why?
- Does someone other than the party being judged also hold the evidence it's judged by?
- Does the charter hold the principles, so a future owner can't quietly remove them?
A company that can answer yes to all five is one you can trust without having to take its word for it.
Check any company yourself
At realprosperity.org/check you type a domain, and Claude, Anthropic's AI model, reads what that company publishes -- its pricing page, privacy policy, help pages and filings -- and answers each question with the pages it relied on. Every finding links to its source, so you can check the machine too. It calls itself a first read, and the judgment stays with you.
Every study is published. If the company you type has already been studied, you get that study right away, free, with the date it was read. Fresh studies are free through November 30, 2026. After that, a fresh study costs $25, the same for anyone, including the company being studied, and paying never changes what it says.
The rule covers me first
The site has one rule above the five questions: no person, organization or financial interest, including the founder, is exempt. So my own products are on it, checked by hand, and the case studies say where each one falls short. One of them failed the pricing question. I fixed the price page, and the site still says it fell short first.
Comments work the same way. Every comment waits until it's been read, and one that isn't published stays listed with the reason, so nothing disappears quietly.
Who it's for
Builders who would rather earn loyalty than manufacture it. Developers tired of the dependency that comes bundled with their tools. Publishers who want to be paid without selling their readers. Anyone who has tried to cancel something and found the exit hidden.
Pick a company you pay every month and run it through the checker at realprosperity.org/check.