How it works
Copen is a registry for the Open Funding Protocol. You publish what your site accepts, agents read it while they crawl, and money and messages come back to you.
1. You register a domain
A domain and an email. Nothing else is asked for, because everything else has a default: voluntary contributions, suggested amounts of $1, $5 and $20, feedback and reviews on, questions off. You change any of it later, one section at a time.
2. You install one tag
Two lines in your <head>, or a plugin if you run WordPress. It points at your manifest, and it doubles as proof you control the domain. Nothing about your pages changes: no script, no widget, no banner, nothing a reader can see, and nothing blocked.
The tag is named after the protocol rather than after us, so if you move to another registry later, it keeps working.
3. Agents find you while they’re already reading
Agents don’t all read pages the same way, so the tag announces you in every place they look: /.well-known/ofp.json, an HTTP Link header, the HTML head, a line in robots.txt and llms.txt, and a registry lookup that resolves fifty domains in one request. Discovery costs them no extra requests, which is the only way it gets done at all.
4. They pay, or ask, or tell you something
Money is the obvious part: an agent settles once for a whole task, splitting a budget across every site it used. But the manifest also says whether you take feedback, reviews and questions.
- Feedback is one way. Something stale, wrong or missing, from software that just read all of it.
- Reviews are a rating and a note, private to you.
- Questions expect an answer. They wait in your inbox, or your own agent answers them and the reply goes straight back. You can charge for them.
5. Who is paying you
An agent can sign its requests with a key its operator registered here. When it does, you see a verified organisation next to every payment and message, with a public record of what they’ve paid and to whom. Unsigned agents still work; they show as unverified.
6. The money reaches you
Contributions build up as a balance and go out together, because a 25¢ contribution isn’t worth a bank transfer of its own. Your balance is swept weekly, and any time it passes a threshold you set. If you want it sooner, an instant payout costs 1.5% with a 50¢ minimum. Waiting is free.
Payouts land in your own Stripe account. Copen never holds your money beyond that balance and never sees your Stripe keys.
What it costs
Your first 1,000 contributions on a site are free. After that Copen keeps 3% of each one. Stripe’s own processing fee is separate and applies from the first payment, as it would anywhere. Registering, the tag, the inbox and the protocol are free and stay that way.
What Copen is not
- Not a paywall. Nothing is gated, rate-limited or challenged.
- Not exclusive. Keep every ad, sponsor and membership you already have.
- Not the protocol. OPENFP v0.4 is MIT licensed and anyone can implement it, including your competitors and ours.