Fund the mission from a mainstream commercial product's ongoing profits, so impact scales with everyday usage instead of fundraising

Mechanism

Instead of asking people to donate, give them a product they would use anyway and make the act of using it fund the cause. Ecosia is the clearest example: searching is something people do every day; advertising revenue from those searches pays for tree planting, so "switch, for free" becomes the contribution. The same logic underlies cause-linked current accounts, debit cards, and shopping extensions.

The goal is to convert a recurring, frictionless behaviour into a recurring revenue stream for the mission — decoupling impact from the fragile, episodic economics of charity fundraising.

Where it fits

This is the engine half of a durable mission-business. It pairs naturally with an ownership lock: the lock decides where the profit goes; this decides whether there is any. It works best where the underlying product is genuinely competitive on its own merits, so the cause is a tie-breaker rather than the only reason to use it.

Operating profile and honest limits

• Impact is hostage to the product's competitiveness. If the product can't hold users against incumbents, the funding shrinks. A charity halo is not a substitute for product quality.
• Platform and supplier dependency. Many such products sit on top of a bigger platform's economics (ad networks, card schemes, a borrowed search index). When the host's terms or rates move, so does the mission funding — covered in the sibling sub-issue.
• "Percentage of profit" can overstate impact. Headlines about giving "80–100% of profit" describe a share of a residual, not an absolute. Honest accounting reports money actually delivered, not just a percentage.
• Niche adoption is the common failure mode. A cause-linked product that never reaches scale never generates enough to matter — and is then withdrawn (see the Freetree case study). Ecosia's own search engine is the success version of this mechanism; it is documented under the steward-ownership solution since the two innovations are combined there.