The mechanism, in plain English
ShopToDoGood is a collection of niche sites covering real hobbies and crafts — calculators for bowl blank sizing, anchor scope math for sailors, feed cost guides for chicken keepers. The sites are built for actual practitioners, not for search bots. Every niche has real math, real terminology, and citations where claims can be grounded.
Before you shop, you pick a charity at /causes — one click, no signup. Your choice lives in your browser. Six verified Wilmington-area 501(c)(3)s are on the slate; we rotate the list based on confirmed nonprofit status, not preference or payments.
When you click through to eBay, Amazon, or Walmart from any page on our network, your charity choice is encoded in the affiliate link. The affiliate network credits the commission back to that specific click. We read which charity to credit. 90% of every affiliate commission we earn is allocated to your charity's bucket. The other 10% covers operations: hosting, AI compute, operator pay, and taxes.
How donations actually get sent. Sending charities 47 cents at a time would be absurd — nobody writes checks for pocket change. Allocated commissions accumulate in a per-charity bucket. When a charity's bucket crosses $1,000, the actual forwarded donation goes out and the receipt publishes on the ledger. Until then, your attributed contribution is real and tracked, but not yet transferred. The math is per-transaction; the transfer is batched.
Your personal contribution history lives at /your-impact — every click you make and every dollar your clicks have allocated to your charity. Forwarded donations (after the threshold is crossed) get published on the ledger with receipts. If you want the math: a $20 affiliate commission becomes $18 allocated to your charity's bucket. A $300 lawn mower purchase might earn us $9 and allocate $8.10. A $2,000 gold coin purchase might earn $40 and allocate $36. Volume math, fully transparent.
What's honest about this
- We are not a 501(c)(3). Your shopping commission is not tax-deductible to you. The 90% is money we collect and are bound to forward to a real 501(c)(3) — held for your chosen charity, never kept by us. They issue their own receipts.
- We start at $0 donated. Every dollar that lands on the ledger is real. We don't fabricate progress or pad the number before it's earned.
- We can't make you click. The mechanism requires actual purchases through our affiliate links. No purchases means $0 to charity. That's honest.
- The 90% commit lives at this URL. We won't change the math without telling you. This page — and the full 90% commitment — is the public record of the split.
- Your charity is your choice. We rotate which charities are on the slate based on verified 501(c)(3) status. We don't pick winners or steer donations.
What this is NOT
- Not a store. We don't sell anything. We link to other people's listings on eBay, Amazon, and Walmart. You're always buying from them, not us.
- Not a content farm. Every niche has practical math, real terminology, and cited sources. Not SEO filler written by someone who has never touched the gear.
- Not a venture-backed startup. One person, AI workers, and a build pattern that scales. The architecture is the moat.
- Not a charity we own. We forward to real Wilmington-area 501(c)(3)s. They are independent organizations with their own governance and receipting processes.
The brand bar
The operator
The operator is Dan Cohen, in Wilmington, Delaware. Background: financial architecture, design, and AI infrastructure. The Hive (thehivemakes.com) is the parent project — an AI-architecture studio that builds honest digital products. ShopToDoGood is one of its initiatives, built on the same anti-fabrication principles the Hive runs on. The goal is a self-sustaining mechanism: sites that earn by being useful, donations that accumulate by volume, and a public ledger that holds the whole thing accountable.
If you want to find me: LinkedIn. Search "build-ai-for-good" — that's me.
The AI architecture
The site is built using a "Hive" pattern — one orchestrator (Opus) directs Sonnet workers via the Claude CLI, each worker scoped to a specific task: a niche, a backend endpoint, a page rebuild. All workers operate under the anti-fabrication brand bar. The 133+ niches were not hand-written one at a time; they were architected, then built in waves of 3–5 niches per worker, with photographic Flux hero images generated by Cloudflare Workers AI, real technical content, and verified affiliate links. The charity-attribution backend — D1 database, attribution tables, click logging, and the public ledger — was built the same way. The orchestration is the work.
Where the money goes
Why don't we forward 100%? Because doing this well costs real money. There's the development and constant improvement of the platform; the research to find genuinely good causes and real deals worth your click; the AI systems and bots that build, check, and maintain the network around the clock; hosting, domains, and compute; and real people doing real work behind it. We keep a small fraction — 10% — to cover those costs and keep the whole operation sustainable, so the other 90% can keep flowing to causes that matter. Put plainly: we'd rather keep a tiny slice and still be here giving in five years than forward 100% once and quietly disappear. Every dollar of the 90% is tracked in the public ledger.
| Affiliate revenue | 90% — Your chosen charity | 10% — Operations |
|---|---|---|
| eBay commission | Forwarded to your chosen Wilmington-area 501(c)(3) | Cloudflare Pages hosting (free tier mostly), AI compute, domains |
| Amazon commission | Forwarded to your chosen Wilmington-area 501(c)(3) | Operator salary at or below market rate for a solo digital operator; taxes |