billyyour money is already voting.
buy closer to home.
do it with neighbours.
type a brand you bought this week.
billy shows you the corporate family tree behind it — named companies, sourced filings, up to the people who ultimately profit.
big companies quietly take money out of your community. here is how you start taking it back.
see who you're really paying.
Tap any of 4,868 brands and the chain unfolds — named companies, labelled hops, sourced filings — up to the people who ultimately profit.
buy somewhere else instead.
Over 400 places we can show you a source for: co-ops, employee-owned, locally anchored. The most useful one rises to the top of your shopping list.
ask the company to change — together.
One person leaving is a preference. Thousands leaving at once is a reason to change. A campaign says exactly what would end it, and everyone votes on what to ask for.
when there's nowhere else to buy, neighbours build it.
Sometimes there is no better option within reach — no co-op, no independent, nothing. That is where Neighbours comes in: people nearby pooling what they have to start the thing that's missing. A Village is how a group organises that together, with the books in the open.
see what we're asking — tracked in the open.
Amazon
Two specific, checkable demands. Members vote them up; the campaign carries the ones that hold.
Everyone votes on short statements, one at a time. What rises is what people agree on across the room — not what 51% wanted. Taiwan settled a national fight this way.
see how the voting works
1 — everyone speaks in statements. Anyone can add one. Everyone votes agree / disagree / pass on each.
2 — you cluster with people who vote like you. The room sorts itself into groups with genuinely different views.
3 — what carries is what BOTH groups agree on. Not the loudest voice, not a bare majority — the statements that bridge.
Taiwan used this to settle how Uber would operate there, after years of deadlock. The government wrote that agreement into regulation. In Bowling Green, Kentucky, 2,000 residents used it to set a town agenda. method: Pol.is-style group-informed consensus · vTaiwan (2015) · Bowling Green (2018)
run this with your own community.
Use the same process with your street, school, or campaign — find what everyone actually agrees on, then point your collective spending at it.
free for everyone. Pro for those who can.
Paying is how you keep it independent.
- Ownership lookup for 4,868 brands
- Join campaigns and vote on demands
- Find local alternatives nearby
- Everything in free
- Early access to new features via Labs
- Bank-linked spending clarity, opt-in
- You keep the mission ad-free
- Listed in the alternatives people see
- Pick your own price on the sliding scale
- Same features at every price
- Rank is not for sale
no ads. no investors. funded by the people who use it.
billy isn't backed by venture capital or advertisers. It's kept alive by ordinary people who think it should exist. Right now we're raising $13,000 to make it safe to organize with and hard to switch off — the whole list is below, down to the last line item.
chip in ♥Is my data private?
Yes. You can look up any brand without an account — a lookup sends the barcode or the name, nothing else. billy has no ads and doesn't sell your data. Bank linking is opt-in and handled through Plaid — your banking credentials never touch us, and your data is deleted when you disconnect. There's no social graph and no follower counts.
Why $2.99 USD?
The bank connection is the part that costs real money. billy uses Plaid to link your account — your bank login goes to Plaid, never to us — and Plaid bills a fee every month for each connected account, whether or not you open the app. That connection is what lets billy show you where your money actually went, instead of you typing it in by hand. Bank linking is the Pro feature, so the people using the expensive part are the ones paying for it. The rest keeps billy independent: no ads, no investors, no selling data. Pro is genuinely optional; the whole app works for free. That figure is in US dollars — the App Store and Google Play set the actual price in your own currency, so what you pay is whatever your store shows.
What's a boycott campaign?
A campaign is a shared, public effort aimed at one company with specific, checkable demands — not a vague "don't buy this." Members write the reasons, vote on them, and the demands that hold across the group carry forward. billy tracks what's happening in the open.
Is this only in Canada?
The ownership data covers many Canadian and US companies, built from SEC EDGAR and SEDAR filings. Ownership lookups work wherever those brands are sold; local alternatives are most complete in Canada today and growing.
Who's behind this?
billy is an independent project founded by Jason, built on public records with a public corrections policy. It's not owned by advertisers or investors — the whole point is that no corporation sits in the middle.
refusing is half of it. the other half is deciding together.
billy is where you refuse. A sibling app — in build now — is where your community meets, decides, and builds the thing that's missing. A town hall in your pocket that keeps pushing you back toward a real table.
decisions that look for what bridges us.
Everyone votes on short statements, one at a time. What carries is what people agree on across groups that disagree about most things — not what 51% wanted. Taiwan settled a national fight this way, and the government wrote the result into law.
stewards chosen by the people who know them — and removable by them.
We're following an older pattern than a corporate board. In the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, clan mothers choose the leaders and can also remove them: leadership is held on conduct, not won once. Almost every app ships the choosing and forgets the removing, which is how bad leadership sets like concrete.
So stewardship here is earned by showing up and looking after people — never by how much you've spent. Choosing money as the measure of who leads would rebuild, street by street, the exact thing this app exists to refuse.
help us make billy safe to organize with — and hard to switch off.
billy holds something worth protecting: who is boycotting what, who they organize with, where they meet. Right now that sits in one database — ours. Encrypting messages would not protect a single row of it. Here is what we're raising, in the order we'd spend it.
A security review by someone who doesn't work here: who can reach what, what we keep that we shouldn't, and what we'd have to hand over if we were compelled to. First money spent, because most of the fix is deletion — and deleting costs nothing.
Adopting the published internet standard for encrypted group messaging rather than inventing our own — nobody should trust homemade cryptography, including ours. Includes the part most apps skip: getting your account back when you lose your phone.
Small radios that pair to a phone and carry short messages about a kilometre across a city with no cell signal and no internet. Enough for "the meeting moved" or "they're here". Not enough for photos — and we'd rather say that than sell you a fantasy.
Everything a community needs to run its own copy of billy on a ten-dollar-a-month server, so the record of who they are lives on hardware they control instead of ours.
what we are not asking you for
Our own hardware. Designing and certifying a device of our own runs $10,000–$30,000 before the first unit ships, plus a permanent repair-and-support job. We'd rather bundle radios that already exist and are already certified.
A pocket mesh. Phone-to-phone mesh networking demos beautifully and then fails quietly, because iPhones suspend background Bluetooth. We won't promise a mesh that relays in your pocket when it wouldn't.
Our own messenger. Building a Signal-grade app is about $48,000, and roughly $21,000 every year after that, forever. If billy ever truly needs to own that, we'll come back and ask — with the receipt.