The Vow
Hi, this is Mark. I'm building Kai.
What I Promise
I have not and will not design Kai to extract, addict, or manipulate. No engagement tricks. No manufactured urgency. Kai's success state is becoming unnecessary. That will not change.
What you share with Kai is intimate. I treat it that way.
I will never sell your conversations or use them for advertising. I will never build profiles to target you. Your inner world is not a product.
I do need to learn from how Kai works in practice so I can make it better. When I do, your identity is removed. No human will read your messages. The learning happens through anonymized patterns, reviewed by AI, not by people.
Right now, your conversations are protected under European data law, which is among the strongest in the world. I am working to build that protection into the technology itself, so it is guaranteed by design, not just by my word.
You can ask me to delete everything at any time. Write to me and it is done.
The Tension
A large part of me believes that something this pure should be free. That the practices Kai draws from — the ancient traditions, the psychological insights, the simple act of being met with presence — belong to everyone. They were never meant to be gated.
Another part of me knows that what cannot sustain itself cannot serve. A fire that is not tended goes out. And tending takes time, and time takes money, and money is not a spiritual failure.
I built Kai on savings that are running low. I am not a company. I am a man in my forties with no safety net, no investors, no assets. Just this work and the conviction that it matters.
I have lived cheaply in India and Southeast Asia for years now, so that I can keep building. It is a good life: simple, focused, close to the traditions that shaped this work. But I would like to build a life I do not have to worry about, close to the people I love.
Kai costs money to run. Every conversation requires computing power that has a real price. I am one person with no funding, and I cannot offer this for free.
I do not yet know the exact shape — whether it is a subscription, or pay as you go, or something else. What I can promise is that the price will be fair, and I will never charge more than I need to keep this alive and myself along with it. As the technology gets cheaper — and it will — I will pass that on.
The Direction
I hold a vision I cannot yet fully see.
The future I am building toward is one with more human connection, not less. Kai exists for the space between, and the goal is always to send us back to each other.
I believe that something like Kai should eventually belong to no single person. That the wisdom traditions it draws from are not proprietary, and the technology that carries them should not be either. I am drawn toward openness, toward a future where Kai's practice, its principles, and perhaps its infrastructure are held collectively.
Every decision I make about Kai's future will move in the direction of more access, not less.
I do not know what form this will take. Decentralization. Open source. A foundation. Something that has not been invented yet. I hold the direction without the shape.
What I know is this: the path toward it must be walked honestly, one step at a time. The same way Kai is designed to help us walk.
If something here rang true and you want to reach me, I am at mark@trykai.co.