To achieve lasting success, open-source projects need more than volunteers—they need money.
Money to fund continuous innovation, support contributors, and sustain growth.
But how you make that money matters.
Today, Big Tech dominates by extracting value—selling your data, restricting your choices, and locking you into their systems.
They get rich by taking from you, often at the cost of your privacy, freedom, and control.
BrainDrive rejects that model completely.
That’s why our mission is to make it easy for you to build, control, and benefit from your own AI system. To do that sustainably, we’re building an economic model based on our core pillars: ownership, freedom, empowerment, and sustainability.
We don’t just think this is better for you—we believe it’s better business, period.
Here’s what that looks like in practice:
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Ownership: Revenue directly enhances BrainDrive Owner capabilities—never exploits data or restricts freedoms.
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Freedom: No lock-ins, no exploitation. Unlike Big Tech, we reject restrictive lock-ins or monetizing user data. All offerings are transparent, optional, and designed to enhance the BrainDrive Owner’s experience and success.
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Empowerment: The BrainDrive Ecosystem enables independent entrepreneurs, developers, and businesses to freely build, distribute, and monetize their creations, without restrictive terms or excessive fees.
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Sustainability: BrainDrive LLC’s financial model ensures long-term sustainability by directly aligning its revenue interests with those of the BrainDrive Community—BrainDrive LLC thrives only when The BrainDrive Community thrives.
And these aren’t just words. The entire BrainDrive ecosystem is architected on top of these pillars:
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BrainDrive Core is MIT licensed, guaranteeing you truly own your AI system and can use it however you wish—free from corporate lock-ins or restrictions.
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BrainDrive Studio gives you complete freedom to build, customize, and innovate. The only limit is your imagination.
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BrainDrive Community empowers you by fostering open collaboration among Owners, Builders, and Entrepreneurs, enabling shared innovation and growth.
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BrainDrive Marketplace provides the economic incentives to sustain the ecosystem. It does this by creating a fair, transparent market, allowing BrainDrive Entrepreneurs to thrive by adding real value to BrainDrive Owners—not extracting from them.
How BrainDrive LLC Fits
BrainDrive LLC is the first economic participant in the BrainDrive ecosystem.
Its mission is the same as BrainDrive itself: to make it easy for you to build, control, and benefit from your own AI system.
By tying the financial success of BrainDrive LLC directly to this mission, we ensure there’s always at least one ecosystem participant whose explicit purpose is driving revenue in ways that support and sustain the entire community.
But we don’t stay aligned just because we promise to. Because it has BrainDrive in the name, BrainDrive LLC’s reputation and success depend entirely on living up to BrainDrive’s values.
Could BrainDrive LLC technically break its commitment? Sure—but that would be like a vegan restaurant deciding to serve steak. If BrainDrive LLC ever goes against the mission, it would lose the trust of the community, and quickly go out of business.
This accountability is intentional. It’s built directly into BrainDrive LLC’s business model.
It ensures that the business always adds value rather than extracting it. BrainDrive LLC succeeds only when the ecosystem succeeds, and that’s by design.
How BrainDrive LLC will earn revenue
We’re in the early days of AI, and no one really knows where it’s all going—including us.
So rather than pretending we have a perfect roadmap for monetization, we’re being clear about what’s important:
How we’ll decide what’s worth charging for, and what’s off-limits.
The Principle: Aligned Incentives
We will only charge for things that deliver clear, optional value to BrainDrive Owners.
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No hidden fees.
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No cuts from your success.
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No coercive lock-in.
If we build something useful, and you choose to pay for it—great.
If you don’t, that’s fine too.
That’s the only sustainable business model in an ownership-first ecosystem.
Potential Examples:
Here are some examples of missioned aligned ways we could drive revenue in the future:
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Managed hosting – for users who want the power of ownership without the overhead. You maintain ownership and control of your system and can exit to another host, or host locally at any time.
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Premium plugins – optional tools that enhance your system without locking you in
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Custom support & services – helping people get up and running, or build on top of BrainDrive
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Federated marketplace listing fees – optional promotion or distribution in a shared network
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Enterprise solutions – for organizations that want to own their AI stack, but need help scaling it
Examples of What We Won’t Do
Some models are off the table, no matter how profitable they look:
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Charging for access to your own data
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Preventing marketplace competition
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Locking core features behind proprietary walls
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Monetizing user behavior or analytics
That’s the Big Tech playbook. We’re not playing that game.
How You Can Earn with BrainDrive
However you want.
- Want to build AI-powered tools and sell them directly? Go ahead.
- Interested in providing specialized services or consulting? Perfect.
- Thinking about creating premium plugins or customization tools? Absolutely.
- Want to compete with products and services offered by BrainDrive LLC? We encourage it.
BrainDrive doesn’t decide how you succeed—you do.
Because at BrainDrive, it’s simple: Your AI. Your Rules.
Why We’re Doing This
We’re not building BrainDrive because we’re a charity or because it just “feels good” (although it does!).
We genuinely believe this is a better economic model for everyone, including ourselves.
People are tired of Big Tech’s captured markets, restrictive practices, and extractive business models.
There’s already a growing wave of demand for user ownership, freedom, and real competition. We didn’t create this movement—we’re joining it, helping accelerate a shift back to genuine free-market principles.
We believe that real free markets, where anyone can compete fairly by adding genuine value, are simply better markets. They create more opportunity, more innovation, and more wealth for everyone involved. That includes us.
BrainDrive isn’t about doing charity, it’s about doing business the right way.
Thanks for reading!
Dave W.
Co-Creator, BrainDrive
Co-Founder, BrainDrive LLC