Look behind your receipt
billy shows you what the public record says, where it says it, and when. Where there are records to go on, a company also carries a score out of ten, worked out by a formula anyone can read, with every record behind it open to you. billy doesn't tell you what to think. What to do about it is yours and your neighbours' to decide.
who owns it, with the source
Every ownership line comes from public filings and registries: SEC EDGAR, SEDAR, the Competition Bureau and Wikidata. Each one carries its source and the date we checked it. When we get something wrong, the corrections page says how to tell us and what we changed.
somewhere closer to buy
Next to the brand you were about to buy, billy shows co-ops, employee-owned businesses and independent shops near you. We only show a place when we can show where we learned about it.
nowhere closer to buy? Let's build it - that's parley →boycotts with teeth
Imagine you and 200,000 people walking into the manager's office with the receipts: where your money went instead, and why you won't come back. That's a boycott with teeth.
one company, clear demands
A campaign names one company and says exactly what would end it. Not "don't buy this". Something checkable.
everyone votes on the demands
Members write the reasons and vote on them. The demands that hold across the whole group are the ones the campaign carries.
the money that moved
billy counts what members stopped spending there and spent somewhere else, this month against last. A number only shows once at least five people are in it. You are the bedrock of the economy and we will show you the numbers.
done when the record says so
A demand is met when a public source says the company did it, and the members agree. Then the campaign ends.
Amazon
- Warrant-only government access to customer data: hand customer data to governments only with a warrant, no voluntary bulk sharing.
- An independent human-rights review of enforcement contracts: open enforcement and surveillance contracts to an independent human-rights audit.
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Pro, and why it costs $2.99
The whole app is free. Pro adds bank linking, so billy can show where your money actually went instead of you typing it in. Your bank login goes to Plaid, never to us. Plaid charges us every month for each linked account, so the people using that part pay for it. Prices are in US dollars; your app store charges in your own currency. We intend to make this free when we can afford to. If you cannot use a bank account you can ALWAYS take pictures of your receipts or bank statements. We believe in data sovereignty, so we collect as little as we can, never sell it and never show ads. If you link a bank, your transactions are stored in our database so billy can show them to you, and only you can see them. The boycott numbers other people see are only totals, and only once at least five people are counted. Disconnect your bank or delete your account, and your transactions are deleted.
for local businesses
Want to be found as an alternative? Want us to tell your story? billy Business is $19–49 USD a month on a sliding scale. You pick your own price and get the same features at every price. You're listed in the alternatives people see. Tell people what they should know about you. Rank is not for sale.
talk to uswhat we're working toward
billy is a BC benefit company, which means the public good it serves is written into the law that created it. Our mission is to become owned by the people who use billy and the people who build it, with any profit going into a treasury you vote on. billy and parley are tools to bring power back to the people.
We're a very small company. We care about making a tool that's genuinely useful, and we want it to stay in the hands of the people who use it. Not investors. Not an ad company. You. Your data is secure. It's encrypted when it's stored and whenever it travels, and access rules decide who can see what. We want to future-proof it too, so no single company, country or outage can switch billy off, or push us into handing over who is organizing with whom.
what we're raising for
Someone who doesn't work here checks who can reach what, what we keep that we shouldn't, and what we'd have to hand over if we were ever forced to. Most of the fix is usually deleting things, and deleting costs nothing.
Our database runs in the United States today. We want it somewhere with stronger privacy law, like Canada or Switzerland.
Real people who answer your questions, fix what's wrong, and help communities get started.
Designers and developers, so billy and parley get better faster and work well for everyone, including people who use screen readers or larger text.
Finding more co-ops, independent shops and employee-owned businesses in more towns, so there's always somewhere closer to buy.
on the road map
These aren't things we're raising for yet. They're where we're heading, so billy keeps working when the usual systems don't.
a self-hosting kit
Everything a community needs to run its own copy of billy, so the record of who they are lives on hardware they control.
ready for cyberdecks
A way to use billy and parley from a cyberdeck, a home-built portable computer, without going through an app store.
ten radios, one neighbourhood
Small radios that pair with a phone and carry short messages about a kilometre, with no cell signal and no internet. Enough for "the meeting moved".
our own servers, somewhere with strong privacy law
Further out, running the database ourselves, somewhere like Iceland, so no outside company holds it at all.
good questions, straight answers
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.
Is my data private?
Yes. You can look up any brand in billy without an account. A lookup sends the barcode or the name, nothing else. There are no ads and we don't sell your data. Bank linking is opt-in and handled through Plaid, so your banking login never touches us, and your data is deleted when you disconnect.