The GPTree tree pledge: a tree a month for every paying customer, and one for every referral

GPTree is named after a tree. The product is a tree: conversations branch, branches carry context, and the shape of the whole thing is borrowed from something that grows. So we plant real ones.

The commitment is simple. Every month, for every person paying for GPTree, we fund one real tree. Not once when you sign up. Every month you stay. And if you refer someone who goes on to subscribe, we plant an extra tree for you on top of your monthly one. You do not click anything, you do not opt in, and it costs you nothing on top of your plan, because it comes out of our side of the subscription.

We fund it through Greenspark, a platform that vets and runs reforestation projects on behalf of the companies paying for them. We are not planting these ourselves, and we are not going to imply that we are.

Why monthly, and why only paying customers

Two choices in that sentence are deliberate.

Monthly rather than one-off. A single tree at signup rewards the wrong thing. It pays out at the moment of maximum optimism and never again, which makes the total a measure of how good our marketing was. Monthly means the number reflects how long people actually stay, which is the honest measure of whether we built something worth keeping. A year on a paid plan is twelve trees.

Paying customers rather than signups. Most companies that do this attach it to signups, because signups are a bigger number and a bigger number sounds better in a headline. Any product with an open registration form collects waves of automated signups, though. They arrive in bursts, they are not people, and no amount of filtering catches all of them. If you attach a real environmental commitment to a number a script can inflate, the number stops meaning anything, and a meaningless number is worse than not having one.

Someone paying for a subscription is a person making a decision with their own money. It is the most honest count available to us, so it is the one we use.

The referral tree follows the same rule. It is planted when the person you referred subscribes, not when they create an account, for exactly the reason above. Their own monthly tree starts at the same moment.

What we do not claim

This part matters more than the pledge itself, because the category is full of claims that do not survive scrutiny.

GPTree is not carbon neutral. We have not measured our emissions. A company that has not measured its emissions cannot claim to have cancelled them, and we are not going to be the exception.

This is not a carbon offset. We buy trees, and a tree is not an audited unit of carbon accounting. Presenting it as one would be dishonest.

It does not cancel out the energy used to answer your questions. Running AI models uses real energy. That is true of us and of every product like ours. A sapling does not make it untrue, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling something.

Trees funded is not the same as trees standing. Reforestation has survival rates, and thirty years is a long time. We fund planting. We cannot promise a forest.

If a measured, audited carbon offset is what you need, buy one from an organisation that sells them and can show you their methodology. What we do is smaller and more modest than that, and we would rather describe it accurately than oversell it.

The receipt

Greenspark publishes a public impact profile for the companies funding through it. Ours shows the running total, and you can open it without taking our word for anything. The link sits on the tree pledge page at gp-tree.com/trees.

That is not decoration. The entire enterprise side of GPTree is built on provenance: where a claim came from, whether the source actually supports it, and whether it is still true. Having built that, it would be strange to run a page about our own environmental impact on adjectives and ask you to trust us. So the claim is narrow, and the evidence is a click away.

If the arrangement ever lapses, we will take the claim down rather than let it drift into something that is no longer accurate.

Why a tree instead of a referral bonus

We looked seriously at paying cash for referrals, and decided against it for three reasons.

Cash rewards get farmed. Any bounty large enough to motivate a real recommendation is large enough to motivate a fake one, and then you are running a fraud detection problem instead of a referral programme.

Cash changes what a recommendation means. If your friend finds out you were paid to tell them about a product, the recommendation is worth less than if you had simply told them.

And a dollar does not do anything. A tree costs us roughly what a small referral bonus would, cannot be converted into anything, and is the only part of GPTree you can go outside and stand next to. So the standing referral reward is a tree, and it is the only bonus we pay on an ongoing basis.