How Debaty makes money

Why this is a separate page

In brief: how a platform makes money determines whose interests it works for.

Most social platforms make money from two things: your attention and your data. The longer you stay and the more they know about you, the more valuable you are. That is not malice but arithmetic — and it is the reason your timeline stays exciting instead of being finished, and that the most heated response ends up at the top.

Debaty is deliberately built differently. That is not a promise to be believed but something to check, so what actually happens, and where you can verify it, is set out below.

Debaty+

In brief: 5.00 euros per month or 50 per year, voluntary, and the free version stays intact.

Debaty+ is a subscription with more generous limits: longer contributions, larger files, more lists and personal timelines, no advertisements. It costs €5.00 per month or €50 per year (two months free). On the Plus page the figure is stated behind each benefit.

What Plus does not do, and that is the point:

• Your contributions do not become more visible. Plus does not buy reach.
• The free version is not hollowed out to make Plus attractive. The limits for a free account are fixed; they are not quietly lowered.
• You lose nothing if you cancel. What you have made stays yours and stays in place.

Advertisements alongside a topic

In brief: the advertisement belongs to the page, not to you.

With us, an advertiser chooses three things: topics, languages and countries. If the page you are reading matches, their advertisement can appear beside it. That is all.

What does not happen, and why you can check it:

• There is no viewer profile. The request with which the advertisement is retrieved carries three things: the topic of the content, the language of the content, and the country associated with the request. It contains no field for who you are — not left empty, but non-existent.
• Your behaviour plays no role. What you read earlier, what you clicked on or which bubbles you opened does not feature in the advertisement choice.
• The advertiser does not see you. They get numbers: how often their advertisement has been shown and how often it has been clicked on, per hour. There is no user ID in that count.
• No trackers are loaded along with it. The image comes from our own server, not from an advertising network. There is no measurement pixel, no third-party script and no advertising cookie — the last of these once existed and has been removed; see the cookie policy.
• There is no advertisement in your conversations. Private messages are not advertising space.

Every advertisement is marked as such and states the topic for which it was chosen — that is the same "why am I seeing this" explanation as with the rest of your timeline.

If you would rather not see any, that is included with Debaty+. If you want to advertise yourself, the terms are set out at advertising.

What we do not do

In brief: four things we do not do, each with the place where you can check it.

Why advertisements at all

In brief: because the bill has to come from somewhere, and the fairest variant is visible.

Servers, storage and people cost money. There are three ways to pay for that: make everyone pay, sell data, or show advertisements. The first shuts people out. The second is precisely what Debaty is built against.

That leaves the third, and it comes in two flavours. The one follows you and sells your attention per person. The other looks at the page and sells the space next to a topic — just as an advertisement in a newspaper sits next to the sports section, regardless of who reads the newspaper. We do the second. It brings in less, and that is the price.

Independence

In brief: one accountable party, no investor who wants your data.

Debaty is provided by JGHP B.V., established in the Netherlands (see the colophon). There is no external party expecting a return on your data.

That is a pleasant position, but no guarantee for eternity — companies can pass to someone else. What happens then is not left vague: the terms of use describe what happens to your data in the event of a transfer, and the privacy statement continues to apply until you receive notice of something else. If anything drastic changes, you will hear about it thirty days in advance.

What you can check of this

In brief: every claim above has a place where it can be verified.

• Sub-processor list — everyone who sees anything of your data.
• Cookie policy — every cookie we set, with what for and how long.
• Your data passport — everything we have of yours.
• How the timeline works — which signals determine what you see.
• Transparency — the moderation figures, counted and not tracked.

Version and changes

In brief: this is version 1.0 of this document, adopted on 23 July 2026.

• v1.0 — 23 July 2026. First adopted, complete version of this document.

Language and validity

In brief: the version you read is the one that applies to you — a translation included.

This document is available on Debaty in fourteen languages. The version in your language applies to you, and it binds us too. Where a translation differs from the Dutch text, the reading that is most favourable to you applies: we cannot hold our own translation error against you.

Dutch is the language in which we write changes and against which we check translations. That is a working arrangement inside our company, not a ranking between readers. If a translation lags behind the Dutch text, we say so at the top of the page, with both dates.

Wherever you live, the mandatory consumer law of your own country continues to apply, whatever else is written here.