Independence & funding statement

Who pays. The founders. World Tension Meter is self-funded. It takes no advertising, no sponsorship, no grants with conditions, no investment and no payment from users.

Who decides. The method decides. Scores are computed by a versioned engine from public signals; no person edits a score by hand. Changes to the method are published before they take effect.

What we refuse. We do not sell data, we do not sell rankings, we do not take money to feature, hide or soften anything, and we do not accept content from any government, party or company.

A risk index is only useful if nobody can lean on it. The moment a score can be bought, delayed or quietly re-weighted, it stops measuring the world and starts measuring who paid.

Our engine does not depend on any provider. It reads dozens of free public feeds, public attention data and open market prices. Any one of them can vanish tomorrow and the index still publishes on schedule.

Everything is checkable. The formula is public, the daily record is downloadable, and the API returns the same numbers the page shows.

Cost, not revenue. The whole observatory runs on one small server. It is built to be cheap enough to run for decades without asking anyone for money.

If that ever changes. Any future support model will be announced on this page and in the changelog before it starts, and it will never touch the scores, the archive or the free API.

Questions about independence: see about for contact. Last reviewed September 2026.