Why Bloomwise commits 1% of revenue to climate action

Can a SaaS company contribute to climate action?

Let's be honest: Bloomwise is not a green company. We run servers, call AI APIs, and every technical SEO audit consumes energy.

But that's precisely why we think it's important to contribute. Not to feel good about ourselves, but because normalizing these commitments in SaaS is the only way to make them systemic.

The software industry has long hidden behind the idea that it was immaterial. A website doesn't smoke, an SEO audit doesn't visibly pollute, so we look the other way. At scale, datacenters, AI model inference, and cloud storage add up to a footprint that is anything but immaterial. Rather than wait for regulation or a label to act, we chose a simple, measurable step, wired directly into the business model.

What we actually do

Since April 2026, Bloomwise contributes 1% of all revenue (not profits, revenue) to Stripe Climate.

This means that on every Solo (EUR 25/month), Pro (EUR 65/month) or Agency (EUR 129/month) subscription, a portion directly funds permanent carbon removal technologies.

The mechanism is invisible to the user: your price doesn't change, no extra line shows up on your invoice. Bloomwise absorbs the cost on its margin. The deliberate choice not to pass it on matters as much as the contribution itself: a commitment funded by your customer is no longer a commitment, it's a product line item.

Why 1%, not 0.5%, not 5%

The number isn't arbitrary. It mirrors the spirit of 1% for the Planet, founded in 2002 by Yvon Chouinard (Patagonia's founder) and Craig Mathews. The original idea: a percentage of revenue routed to environmental causes, visible enough to count, sustainable enough not to break a growing business.

At 0.5%, the commitment disappears into accounting noise and sends no internal signal. At 5% or 10%, you enter sacrifice territory, which inevitably gets renegotiated the first time the year goes south, and a commitment you cancel at the first headwind is worth less than no commitment at all. At 1%, you hit the threshold where the contribution is real without becoming a structural risk.

Anchoring the 1% to revenue rather than profits is just as deliberate. An early-stage startup typically has zero or negative net income for its first few years. Tying the contribution to profits would mean giving nothing until profitability arrives, which can take years or never happen at all. A 1% revenue contribution guarantees that we're contributing from the first euro collected, regardless of the month's bottom line. It's more demanding. It's also the only way to keep a commitment that isn't conditional.

Why Stripe Climate and not traditional offsets?

Traditional carbon offsetting (planting trees, buying forestry credits) has a problem: it's often temporary, hard to verify, and doesn't permanently remove carbon from the atmosphere.

Stripe Climate is different. The program funds frontier science:

• Direct Air Capture (DAC): machines that pull CO2 from the atmosphere and store it as minerals.
• Bio-oil: biomass converted into stable oil injected underground, where carbon stays locked for millennia.
• Enhanced mineralization: crushed rocks that absorb CO2 through accelerated natural chemical reactions.

Every project is selected by an independent scientific review panel and must demonstrate permanent removal (not just reduction or avoidance).

This permanence requirement changes everything. A tree planted today that burns ten years from now releases the carbon it had stored. A mineralized rock keeps CO2 locked on a geological timescale. By funding these technologies today, we contribute to a carbon removal infrastructure that didn't exist five years ago and won't scale unless demand follows. It's a bet on science and on scale effects, not on marketing.

Our carbon footprint, what we know and what we don't

Let's be direct: we don't have a complete carbon audit of Bloomwise. Not yet. Doing it properly takes time, methodology, and ideally an external partner to avoid self-assessment bias. It's a project we'll take seriously once we have the resources to do it without cutting corners.

What we know qualitatively: our main emission sources come from three places. Frontend hosting (Vercel) that serves the application. The API and database (Supabase, AWS Europe infrastructure) that store data and run calculations. And above all, calls to language models used for AI visibility analysis, article generation, and semantic analysis. This third category is probably the heaviest per unit, because LLM inference is intrinsically energy-intensive.

What we don't know: the exact volumes. We'd rather not throw out approximate numbers in kWh or tons of CO2 without serious methodology behind them. It's precisely to avoid greenwashing by guesswork that we chose to start contributing before having perfect measurement. Measuring takes months. Reducing takes years. Contributing can start today. All three are necessary, in this order or in another, but delaying action while waiting for the perfect measurement is a fake rigor that translates, in practice, into doing nothing.

How much does it represent?

Let's be transparent: for an early-stage startup, 1% of revenue is a modest amount. But what matters is the principle.

If every SaaS contributed 1% of revenue to carbon removal, the cumulative impact would be significant. And these technologies need demand to decrease in cost and scale up, exactly like solar and wind fifteen years ago.

This isn't an optimistic projection, it's a known economic mechanic. A technology with no market doesn't get cheaper, because it has no reason to industrialize production. A solar panel in 2010 cost several times what it costs today, and the difference doesn't come from one isolated breakthrough but from the emergence of aggregated demand large enough to justify factories, optimization, and competition. Permanent carbon removal is at exactly that stage. Every company funding the program today helps make the technology accessible to those who'll want to use it ten years from now.

This isn't greenwashing

We're not slapping a green logo on our site to sell more subscriptions. Here's what makes the difference:

• It's automatic: the contribution is built into Stripe. There's no quarter where we "forget."
• It's verifiable: our contribution is public on Bloomwise's Stripe Climate page.
• It's a percentage of revenue, not profits. Even in months where we don't make money, the contribution is collected.

Automation is the central piece. Any climate commitment that depends on a manual decision, validated each quarter by a team that also has a product to ship and a runway to watch, eventually gets skipped. Not out of cynicism, out of fatigue. Wiring the contribution directly into Stripe's flows ensures that the commitment survives bad months, pivots, and any future team turnover. A commitment that depends on human discipline isn't a commitment, it's a good intention.

What's next?

Our medium-term goals:

1. Maintain the 1% regardless of Bloomwise's growth trajectory.
2. Document our carbon footprint: server consumption, API calls, infrastructure. You can't reduce what you don't measure.
3. Favor committed vendors: Vercel (renewable energy), Supabase (AWS eu-west), Stripe (carbon neutral since 2021).

Longer term, the goal is to move from a "contribute" model to a "contribute + measure + reduce" model. The three steps aren't sequential, they're parallel, and the second is probably the hardest because it demands a rigor we don't yet have. We'll talk about it when we have something solid to show, not before.

What to remember

The 1% for climate isn't a marketing line. It's a simple mechanic: route a percentage of revenue to a serious program, automate it, and make it public. We did it because it was the right time, and because waiting until we're profitable to act is a way of never acting. If you want to know who's behind Bloomwise and how we build the product, take a look at our About page. If you're trying to evaluate SEO tools on criteria beyond price, we also wrote a guide on how to choose SEO software. And if you want to try the product, Bloomwise is free for 14 days.