The idea
Pally is a companion you can talk to without making an account, and a set of small tools — a breathing rhythm, a place to vent and burn it, a calm room to walk through, a card you can keep — for the moments when talking isn't the thing you need. It is deliberately not a wellness programme. There is no streak, no score, no progress you can fail at.
How it pays for itself
A free product has to be funded by something, and the honest question is always: by what? Pally's answer has three parts, and none of them is your conversation.
- Aggregate signals. With explicit opt-in, a broad category counter is incremented — never the message. Businesses buy grouped counts with small cohorts suppressed and numbers rounded. The unit sold is a statistic, not a person.
- Contextual advertising. Rotation-based, clearly labelled, no profile and no tracking script. An advertiser buys a slot, not an audience dossier.
- Affiliate offers. Disclosed as affiliate links, shown only where they are relevant, never dressed up as a recommendation from a friend.
What we refused to build
- A conversation table. There is no schema for storing what you say, so no future change of heart can quietly start storing it.
- A persistent public-user identifier. Sessions are not linkable across visits — not even pseudonymously.
- Behavioural ad targeting. It would have been worth more money and it was not worth it.
- Precise location and exact birth dates. Country, optional region and an age bracket are enough for a statistic and not enough to find someone.
What Pally is not
It is not a therapist, not a crisis service, and not a substitute for a person who knows you. When a conversation suggests someone is in danger, Pally stops being clever and says so plainly, with a reminder to reach a human who can actually be there. That behaviour is implemented separately from the companion's personality precisely so that no amount of conversational steering can talk it out of doing its job.
The build
Pally runs on Next.js with a Totalum database, a swappable AI gateway, server-verified PayPal payments, and a durable background-job ledger. The help page documents the methodology behind every number a business can buy, and the privacy page describes the data handling as implemented rather than as intended.