About You Are The Product

Our purpose

You Are The Product exists to give everyday people a clear, shareable answer to the question that always gets hand-waved: “How much money did my screen time make today?” We built it so anyone who scrolls, games or streams can grab real numbers that back up gut feelings about design choices, monetisation tricks and personal habits.

Instead of another passive dashboard, the experience behaves like a playful audit. Each step nudges you to plug in honest usage, line apps up side by side and tell a more interesting story about what your time is worth.

How the model is assembled

The math is stitched together from public receipts you can point to, so the numbers never feel mysterious:

• Official earnings calls, shareholder letters and filings the companies already publish.
• Trusted industry trackers such as Sensor Tower, App Annie, Statista and We Are Social.
• Deep dives from watchdog reporters and digital rights groups that expose monetisation splits.
• Community benchmarking when people share CPM ranges, time-on-app logs or other open data.

We smooth those inputs, convert average revenue per user into dollars per minute and let you layer your own time on top. Everything runs in your browser, so nothing you type ever leaves the page.

Modelling principles

To keep the receipts believable we follow a few simple rules:

• Transparency over precision: We cite the source, stay conservative and skip any guesswork we cannot defend.
• Region-aware: Ad money is uneven, so North America and Western Europe get higher multipliers instead of a lazy global average.
• Time value lens: Your attention compounds like interest, so lifetime projections always show how far along you already are.
• Privacy by design: No accounts, no data hoarding, no surprise cookies. If a metric is not necessary, we do not collect it.

Who the tool serves

Anyone who has ever wondered “how much did this app make off me today?” can put the audit to work:

• Everyday scrollers finally see a dollar amount tied to the time lost inside social feeds, games or short-form video loops.
• Roommates and group chats swap the numbers when comparing who got trapped in which feed the longest.
• Creators and hosts drop the charts into newsletters, podcasts or live streams to show the hidden cost of “free” experiences.
• Money nerds and conversation starters plug the benchmarks into blogs, threads or group chats whenever the attention economy comes up.

If you quote or publish the results, please attribute You Are The Product so others can reproduce the same math.

What is coming next

We are building features that keep the audit quick, playful and useful for day-to-day choices:

• Rapid-fire scenarios for people who hop between five apps before breakfast.
• Side-by-side matchups that call out which platform drains the most money from your attention.
• One-tap downloads so you can drop the numbers into a budget sheet, spicy group chat or wild late-night rant.
• Optional API keys for builders who want to remix the data inside their own dashboards.

Have an idea, feature request or dataset to contribute? Send it our way and we will prioritise what helps the community most.

Team and collaboration

You Are The Product is maintained by an independent designer and developer with a background in market intelligence and human centered design. Staying self-funded keeps the work nimble and focused on helping real people first. We rely on friends, early testers and curious readers who try experiments, share screenshots and help keep the math honest. Reach out if you want to jam on a feature, highlight a dataset or tell us how you are using the audit in daily life.

Contact

Questions, corrections, media enquiries or partnership ideas can be sent to support@urtheproduct.com. We typically reply within a few business days.