How Drops works

What if the town owned what the town uses?

Education, childcare, retail, mental health. Every category got absorbed by a national chain that extracts the surplus and ships the profit somewhere else. Wellspring is the structural alternative. Same products. Same convenience. The surplus stays here. The rules can't be quietly changed.

Dollars leaving Flagstaff right now
$0
Conservative estimate of $1B / year extracted from Flagstaff to national chains and out-of-state shareholders. That's roughly $31.71 every second, and it's been climbing since you opened this page.
The pattern

Local grocers were each successful
until the supermarket showed up.

The problem isn't the businesses. It's the model. A national chain enters a town with prices the locals can't match. The locals close. The town now depends on a chain whose profits leave by Friday and whose decisions are made in another state.

This pattern repeats in every category, not just grocery. Mental health was your family doctor. Now it's BetterHelp. Live music was your local venue. Now it's LiveNation. Tutoring was a neighbor's kid. Now it's Chegg charging $19.95 a month, automatically renewing, with a cancellation flow designed by people who hate you. The convenience is real. The extraction is also real.

Was
Your family doctor's referral
A 15-minute drive. Insurance covered most of it.
Auto-renews
BetterHelp
Next session in 3 days
$260 / month$3,120 / year → Teladoc, Mountain View CA
I pay this
Was
A neighbor's kid tutoring math
Twenty bucks for an hour. She bought lunch with it the next day.
Auto-renews
Chegg Study
7-day free trial ended Mar 14
$19.95 / month$239.40 / year → Santa Clara CA
I pay this
Was
Your aunt watching the kids
She'd take them Tuesdays and Thursdays. The kids loved her dog.
Tuition
KinderCare
Waitlist: 4 months
$1,800 / month$21,600 / year → KKR, NYC (private equity)
I pay this
Was
Main Street hardware, grocery, books
A walk to four shops. Sometimes you ran into people you knew.
Annual
Amazon Prime
Same-day delivery active
$139 / year+ avg $2,400 / yr in orders → Seattle WA
I pay this
Your annual extraction so far
$0
Tap the cards above to add the ones you actually pay for. Watch what your share of the $1B looks like.
"Disneyland sits on land where the Tongva and Acjachemen lived. The communities who absorbed the noise, the displacement, and the cultural erasure got minimum-wage jobs."
When corporations promise to "give back" 0.5% of profits, they keep the other 99.5%. The performative philanthropy isn't the problem. The structural ownership is. Wellspring asks the question nobody else is asking: what if the people who absorb the costs of a thing also own the thing?
RETURNED 0.5%
Why Flagstaff. Why now.

Every generation has a surplus.
Every generation has a gap.

The town isn't broken because anyone is failing. It's broken because the gaps and surpluses don't talk to each other. The student who needs $40 has Tuesday afternoons free. The senior who has Tuesday afternoons free needs someone to talk to. The parent who needs childcare on Tuesday afternoons can pay $40. Three problems, one obvious solution, no system to make it happen. Wellspring is the system.

19%
of NAU students are housing insecure. Highest of all 3 Arizona universities.
ABOR · 2024
+150%
growth in LEAF emergency fund demand in one year. 54 to 135 students.
NAU LEAF · 2024
8.2M
pounds of food distributed by FFFC last year. Free dinner served 365 nights, no ID required.
FFFC · 2024
$0
cost of MySSP counseling. 24 / 7. Phone or app. Already paid by tuition. Most students don't know.
NAU MySSP

Each generation as both contributor and beneficiary.

Look at any single age group in Flagstaff and you'll see a list of needs that read like a charity case. Look at all four together and you'll see something else: a network of complementary surpluses and gaps that fit each other almost too neatly. Wellspring is the protocol that makes the matching cheap, fast, and constitutional.

Students
18-24 · ~30,000 NAU
Surplus
Hours, energy, app fluency, willingness to learn
Needs
Money, mentors, belonging, a reason to stay
→ Contributes: tutoring, events, content
Working families
28-50 · two earners
Surplus
Income, momentum, professional skills, networks
Needs
Time, affordable childcare, a third place
← Receives: childcare, tutoring, events
DROPS
Connective
tissue
Empty-nesters
55+ · mortgage paid
Surplus
Skills, wisdom, equity, time, stability
Needs
Connection, purpose, intergenerational contact
→ Contributes: mentorship, hosting, co-op shifts
Anchor institutions
SOTH · NAU · FFFC · Library
Surplus
Buildings, credibility, governance, established trust
Needs
Engagement, relevance, sustainable funding
→ Contributes: space, governance, infrastructure

Each card's surplus fills another card's gap. The student's free hours fill the family's childcare need. The family's income fills the student's money gap. The senior's wisdom fills the student's mentor gap. The anchor's building fills everyone's space gap. Wellspring sits in the center and makes the matching automatic.

A Tuesday in the network

The same day, three people, one shared system.

Tap each name to follow their day. Notice that every transaction is also somebody else's resource.

8:30am
Reads a Field Notes card on rent strategy. Earns ◆ 6. + ◆ 6
2:00pm
Tutors Maya's 9th-grader in algebra at the SOTH youth room. Earns ◆ 60 for the hour. + ◆ 60
4:30pm
Stops at Macy's Coffeehouse. Spends ◆ 50 on a sandwich and a coffee. Real food, real money, no Chegg subscription needed.
7:00pm
Goes to a free concert at the Library, organized through Plaza. Sees Frank, the retired teacher who runs the math co-op she sometimes guest-tutors.
7:45am
Drops the kids at the SOTH parent co-op. Frank is on duty today. She pays $40 in drops instead of $90 to KinderCare.
2:00pm
Books Zara for an hour of algebra tutoring through the Wellspring education vertical. $60 in drops, money she would have given Chegg for less.
5:30pm
Stops at the Community Market for groceries. Half cash, half drops. Vendor's profit stays in town instead of going to Walmart Bentonville.
9:00pm
Has time to read because she didn't spend the evening fighting with Chegg's cancellation flow. time saved
9:00am
Volunteers at FFFC serving the morning meal. Earns ◆ 80 for the shift, but that's not why he's there.
2:00pm
Watches Maya's kids at the SOTH co-op. He's not childcare staff. He's grandpa Frank to four kids who needed a grandpa Frank.
5:00pm
Spends ◆ 80 at the Community Market. Buys ingredients for the math co-op dinner he hosts on Thursdays. Zara usually shows up.
7:00pm
Goes to the same Library concert. Sees the kids he watched. Sees the student he mentors. Sees Maya, who waves. purpose

No charity. No condescension. Just a system that lets each generation's surplus reach the gap that's shaped exactly like it. Wellspring makes the matching cheap, fast, and constitutional. See the full data on /why-flagstaff →

The marketplace

The Costco of Flagstaff. The Headspace of Flagstaff.
The LiveNation of Flagstaff. Owned by Flagstaff.

Wellspring is building community-owned alternatives to the categories corporations absorbed. Same convenience. Same product quality. The surplus stays in the pool. The decisions are made by the people who use it. The infrastructure can't be acquired or restructured because of how it's legally and technically built.

Phase one focuses on four verticals, the ones with the lowest cost to start and the highest community demand.

Replacing · Chegg · Khan · Coursera
Education + tutoring
Peer-to-peer tutoring marketplace. Field Notes guides for what NAU doesn't teach. Study groups, exam prep, career pivots, all paid in drops, surplus to the pool.
  • NAU peer tutors paid in ◆
  • Career pivot guides + workshops
  • Study group coordination
  • Resource amplification (LEAF, advisors, gen ed)
Live · Phase 1
Replacing · KinderCare · Bright Horizons
Childcare + family
Community-organized childcare cooperatives. Parent networks. Family resource sharing. Hours pooled at SOTH and partner spaces. The model the suburbs forgot.
  • Parent co-op scheduling
  • SOTH nursery hours bankable as ◆
  • Family resource directory
  • After-school programs at partner sites
Building · Phase 1
Replacing · Amazon · Walmart · Target
Local commerce + retail
The merchant network. Bulk purchasing co-op. Community Market expansion. Drops accepted at every partner storefront, from coffee to groceries to services to repair shops. Same-day local delivery.
  • Macy's, Plaza Vieja, partner shops
  • Bulk co-op for staples (rice, oats, paper)
  • Community Market vendors
  • Local delivery network
Live · Phase 1
Resourcing · Headspace · BetterHelp
Mental health + community
Not clinicians yet. That comes later, with licensed partners. For now: the discovery layer. Surfacing what already exists (MySSP, NAU Counseling, Campus Health) and the peer support layer that wraps around it.
  • MySSP awareness (free 24/7 counseling, $0)
  • Lower Lights journaling tools
  • Peer support groups
  • Community wellness events
Discovery · Phase 1

Phase 2 expands into events (LiveNation alternative), entertainment, and bulk grocery. Each vertical earns its own merchant agreements, its own pool allocation, and its own community vote.

The acquisition layer

Headspace spends $40 to acquire a user.
We spend $0.

The hardest part of any community-owned alternative isn't the verticals. It's getting people to use them when Headspace, Chegg, and Amazon already have their accounts.

We solved it like this. Instead of paying Instagram for clicks, we make content people actually want. Practical guides, long reads, local events, journaling tools. Every read replaces an ad. By the time a user has earned 100 ◆ from engaging with content, she's already walked into a partner storefront and used them. She's onboarded without anyone paying for her acquisition.

Conventional cost
$40
Average customer acquisition cost for a wellness app. Paid to Meta, Google, TikTok. Profit leaves Flagstaff.
The Drops cost
$0
Content created in-house. Read by students. Earns drops. Drives them to partner storefronts. Acquisition pays for itself in usage.
How a user actually arrives
The two-tier system

Drops are for everyone.
Ownership is for the permanent ones.

One of the structural mistakes of every community currency that came before was conflating the user with the owner. Anyone who held the token had governance rights, which meant when the token went viral, the original community lost control of its own infrastructure to whoever bought in.

Wellspring separates these two layers cleanly. The token is for daily use. The DAO is for permanent stake.

Tier 1 · the token
Drops (◆)
A loyalty currency anyone can earn and spend. Like Sephora Beauty Insider points or Starbucks Stars, except the loyalty stays in town instead of going to a Seattle HQ.
Who holds it
Anyone. Students, visitors, residents, anyone.
How earned
Reading content, attending events, volunteering, referrals
Where spent
Partner storefronts, the Community Market, Wellspring verticals
Governance rights
None. It's a currency, not equity.
Tier 2 · the constitution
The DAO
The ownership and governance layer. Reserved for permanent stakeholders: residents, business owners, anchor institutions, and long-term contributors. The DAO is what makes the system unrepudiatable.
Who's a member
Residents, merchant partners, anchor orgs (SOTH, FFFC, NAU partners), long-term contributors
What they own
Equity stake in the verticals + voting power on major decisions
What they vote on
New verticals, allocation rules, merchant fee structure, pool distributions
Why it's permanent
Constitutional immutability. The DAO can't vote to disband itself or sell to a corporation.

A token user is a customer. A DAO member is a co-founder. Both matter. Neither replaces the other.

The constitutional layer

Corporations say "we'll never sell."
We made it structurally impossible.

Every community-first organization eventually faces an offer it can't refuse. An acquisition, a pivot, a "modernization" that quietly turns the mission into a memory. Ben & Jerry's was sold to Unilever. Whole Foods was sold to Amazon. Tom's of Maine was sold to Colgate. The founders meant well. The structure didn't protect the spirit.

The blockchain isn't here to make anyone rich. It's here to make a single promise unrepudiatable: the rules of this community, written at founding, cannot be amended away. Even by the people who founded it. Even by their successors. Even with a unanimous vote. Some things are constitutional, not negotiable.

The four immutable clauses

Written into the chain at founding. Cannot be amended. Cannot be voted away. The DAO can change a thousand things. These four it cannot.

Clause i
The pool cannot be drained
Surplus from verticals flows to the community pool by smart contract. No board, no founder, no future executive can redirect that flow. The percentage is set at founding and protected at the protocol level.
Clause ii
The DAO cannot dissolve itself
Even by unanimous vote. The community is permanent. New stewards take over from old ones. Acquirers cannot acquire the entity because it has no owner who can sell it.
Clause iii
The verticals cannot be privatized
The childcare cooperative, the tutoring marketplace, the merchant network. All are owned by the DAO collectively. They cannot be spun out, sold off, or restructured into private companies.
Clause iv
Every transaction is auditable forever
Where every dollar came from. Where every drop was earned and spent. Public, permanent, queryable by any member or any auditor. There's no quiet line item where a future board could hide an extraction.

This is not crypto for speculation. The token doesn't trade on exchanges. There's no "drops to the moon." The blockchain is here for one reason: to make the constitutional rules impossible to break, even by people who mean well.

See how the economics work →
The questions you're already asking

Every reasonable skeptic asks these.
Tap to read the answer.

If you're reading this carefully, you're probably weighing it against every community currency, co-op, DAO, and "people-powered platform" that came before. Most of them failed or got absorbed. That's fair skepticism. Tap each question to expand.

"What stops this from becoming another loyalty program that gets sold to a national chain in five years?"
Constitutional immutability. Wellspring cannot be sold because there's no owner who has the authority to sell it. The DAO cannot vote to dissolve itself. The pool cannot be drained. Even if every original founder left tomorrow, the structure protects what they built. This is the entire point of the blockchain layer. It's not for speculation. It's to make a promise that can't be quietly retracted.
"Why would a merchant accept drops instead of dollars?"
Because drops drive foot traffic that wouldn't have come otherwise. The merchant redeems drops from the pool at a subsidized rate (drops cost less than dollars but bring in customers who become repeat dollar customers). And the merchant becomes a partner in a system that markets them for free, replacing the Yelp ads and Instagram boosts they were already paying for.
"How is this different from the 50 community currency experiments that failed?"
Two structural differences. First, separation of token and ownership. Most community currencies conflated user and owner, which meant they got captured by speculators. Wellspring keeps these tiers separate. Second, the verticals. A community currency that only buys coffee fails. A community currency that buys childcare, tutoring, mental health support, and groceries has actual utility. The verticals are the foundation. The token is the connective tissue.
"What if the founders are corrupt or incompetent?"
The founders don't have the authority to be either. The four constitutional clauses constrain what the DAO can do, and the DAO constrains what the founders can do. Any major decision is auditable, public, and subject to anchor institution ratification (SOTH, NAU partners, FFFC). If the founders walk away or go bad, the structure persists. The system was designed to outlive its founders by default.
The loud questions

The four pushbacks people get loud about
before they understand what this is.

These come up in the first conversation, every single time. Worth taking seriously, because they usually reveal that someone is arguing against a thing we're not actually proposing. Direct answers below.

i
"Is this socialism?"
What you're picturing
A government bureaucrat in a gray suit deciding which businesses get to exist, what they charge, and what your share of them is. Lines for bread. Centrally planned coffee shops. Five-year plans for childcare.
What it actually is
A cooperative. The same legal structure as REI. The same legal structure as your credit union. The same legal structure as the Green Bay Packers, who are owned by their fans and have never once been moved to Las Vegas. Members own equity in the businesses they shop at. Voluntary. Private. Pretty American, actually.
  • REI, member-owned, did $4 billion in revenue last year
  • Land O'Lakes, owned by farmers, did $19 billion
  • Vanguard, owned by its investors, manages $9 trillion
  • The Green Bay Packers, owned by 360,000 fans, won four Super Bowls
ii
"What's wrong with a business making a lot of money?"
What you're hearing
That profit is morally suspect. That successful businesses are exploitative by definition. That if a coffee shop owner buys a nice car, we should all be upset about it.
What we're actually saying
Nothing's wrong with profit. We want the verticals to make money. The question is where the profit goes. Amazon makes about a billion dollars off Flagstaff and the surrounding area every year. That money flies to Seattle on a Tuesday. We're proposing the same products, the same convenience, but the billion stays in town. That's it. That's the whole pitch.
  • Profit isn't the problem
  • Profit leaving town is what closed Main Street
  • Drops merchants keep their margins, that's their business
  • The pool is funded by business purchases, donations, grants, and surplus
iii
"America is a capitalist country."
The unstated assumption
That "capitalism" only means publicly traded corporations with shareholders, executives, and quarterly earnings reports on CNBC. Anything that doesn't have a stock ticker must be from the other team.
What capitalism actually contains
Capitalism is about property rights and voluntary exchange. Wellspring uses both. DAO members own their share. Merchant agreements are voluntary. Nobody is forcing anyone into anything. Honestly, this is more capitalist than Walmart, because Walmart cashiers don't own a sliver of Walmart. Wellspring members and merchants will own a sliver of Wellspring.
  • ESOPs (employee stock plans), legal in all 50 states
  • Co-ops, every credit union, every grocery co-op
  • B-Corps, Patagonia, Ben & Jerry's (before Unilever bought them)
  • Mutuals, State Farm, USAA, Mass Mutual
iv
"Is this a boycott?"
What you're worried about
A guilt campaign telling you to delete Amazon, cancel Headspace, shame your friend for using Chegg. Yard signs. Town hall arguments. Someone tagging you on Instagram for buying diapers at Target.
What it actually is
Use them if they're better for you. We're competing on merit. If we can offer better childcare than KinderCare for less money, with the surplus going to your neighbors instead of KKR (which, fun fact, is the private equity firm that owns KinderCare), then people will choose us. If we can't, they won't. That's not a boycott. That's a market.
  • No call to abandon any platform
  • No moral pressure on anyone
  • Compete on price, quality, and where the money goes
  • The most capitalist sentence in this whole document: let people decide
"This isn't anti-capitalist. It's anti-extractive."
We're not trying to dismantle the market. We're trying to compete in it, with a structure that keeps the surplus in the town that earned it. That's how REI works. That's how your credit union works. That's how the Green Bay Packers work. We're just doing it across more categories, with the constitutional protections that keep it from being bought out by Unilever in ten years.

The town pays for the noise.
The town should own the theme park.

A community-owned alternative to corporate consumption. Same products. Same convenience. Surplus stays here. Rules can't be broken. That's the whole pitch.

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