thomasmost

Incredible stuff. "Instead of using a content management system for our content management, what if we used GitHub??"

One of the things we're doing is encouraging our customers to reach out to their vendors to request it!

I'm a full-stack developer that started my work on Bend using Rocket and then migrated to Axum. Would be very happy to contribute/be a part of a community initiative like the one you describe

Thank you! We would love to have you try it out :)

Thank you so much!

Good advice, thank you.

Just wanted to update the Hacker News community here that we just launched on Product Hunt as well! Y'all asked a ton of amazing questions here and if you wouldn't mind checking this out as well and engaging if you're so moved, every little bit helps! Thanks <3

https://www.producthunt.com/posts/bend-3

I meant this turned the other direction lol

We have a large database of carbon intensity factors generated using government data from two different sources (the EPA and Exiobase). Comparing our merchant specific factors to those industry standards, you might be surprised by how accurate it is.

I don't understand what you're saying. Replacing a 10k cloud service with 100k of private server equipment would probably reduce a company's co2 balance.

We will never sell financial data.

+1, it also really depends on the offset (as to whether it's a scam or not)—like I talked about elsewhere, even our low-cost offset is a much more credible project than some of the credits frequently purchased by big companies.

If we don't start changing the standard for what's acceptable, who will, ya know?

We're huge supporters of a carbon tax, but there are significant challenges, both technical and political. If we had perfect information and the political will, I think the approach you describe would be great—in the meantime, unfortunately, the market needs tools like Bend.

I actually wrote a blog post on the subject, if you're curious: https://bend.green/blog/the-path-to-a-carbon-tax

Exciting! Would love to hear more about it and chat all things climate-tech in our Discord server if you're interested: https://discord.gg/muGxr24U

Good luck to you too!

Yes, $100/month is our Startup pricing. Enterprise customers have very different needs and multiple bank connections to manage, so we approach those case-by-case.

To be fair, I think a solution like Bend would help companies make the kinds of decisions your advocating for. "You can't improve what you don't measure," so Bend offers a measurement tool that enables procurement managers to make smart buying decisions. Companies pay lots of money for other internal reporting tools; why should sustainability be any different?

Good question! We don't currently consider payroll a carbon emitting activity. Generally we think of salary as paying exclusively for human-hours.

In contrast, if your company paid for your metro card or reimbursed for mileage or gas on your commute, we would estimate the carbon intensity for those expenses.

Absolutely. Even though we have a fintech background and we're tackling carbon accounting from the angle of spend, we know how sensitive revenue and budget data are. Our business is firmly in mapping the carbon graph; we'll never sell financial insights.

From a regulatory perspective, yes, there's a lot of pressure being generated in European markets. In the US, another thing we're starting to see is pressure from procurement managers at large companies like Salesforce. Since Salesforce is committed to a net-zero footprint, anyone selling software to Salesforce needs to at least report their emissions (we can help with that!)—and as more companies adopt similar policies, hopefully we'll see more market incentive to report, reduce, and offset

Thank you! There's not a ton of activity yet but if you wanna hang out with us and chat all things climate-tech, here's the link to our Discord: https://discord.gg/muGxr24U

Bend, Oregon?

I'm from Seattle, but I've actually wanted to visit Bend for a while. Seems like a nice river town

We are offsetting all our emissions via the Bend Offsets Plan, so the carbon footprint of your $100 Bend subscription is credibly net-zero :)

And yes, line-item and other "level 3" data is very exciting to us techies—unfortunately it's also really difficult to access! One of the reasons we like the Bend model is that it simplifies/abstracts away from that by looking at your total contribution to a company's bottom-line as the source of truth for emissions, which prevents a kind of "line item greenwashing."

But yes, in the future it would be nifty to sync in level 3 data from receipts or something to factor that into our calculations!

I like the way you're thinkin'! That's a very "Bend-onomics" mindset, if I can be so presumptive.

That calculation is not dissimilar from what we do on a merchant-level, and I think it's a good, macro-comparison! For your three variables, we just substitute 1) transaction amount, 2) vendor revenue, and 3) vendor emissions, if that makes sense.

There are many reasons why it's important to do this at the merchant level, but one of the most exciting (from an economics perspective) is to amplify market pressure on high-emitters. In the future, you can imagine a green marketplace powered by Bend, where you can instantly comparison shop for providers with lower "carbon intensities" than those you're currently using.

Yes, green-washing is definitely a problem. There is an incredibly wide variance of quality among carbon offsets, from dubious avoidance offsets priced at $2 per ton of CO2-equivalent emissions (tCo2e) to actually sucking carbon out of the atmosphere and sequestering it below the earth for $600-1000 per tCo2e.

At Bend, we are trying to really apply pressure on the market to be real about going "net-zero." Our offsets package is priced at $100 per ton, which is still surprisingly affordable for a lot of small companies. We blend that package across reforestation projects (low-cost) and true carbon removal project (high-cost) to offset a company's emissions, in order to funnel investment towards those more expensive operations. This is important so that companies like Charm Industrial and Climeworks can increase their efficiency and bring the price-point of carbon removal down.

And while $100/tCo2e might sound expensive, our thesis is that it's still remarkably affordable, especially for small companies who factor it in early on. This program is also opt-in, so you can start out with Bend just to measure your emissions and then decide about offsetting later... but for us, for example, our "Carbon Bill" hovers between just $25 to a $100 per month. Barely doubles the cost of the base subscription!