The Founder's Pass

£99, once. The first 1,000 people, in the first season only. Then never again.

Everything the Season Pass ever unlocks, for as long as Powdium exists.

Why this exists, said plainly

Powdium is new and nobody has heard of it. A competition app is worth nothing until your friends are in it, which means the first season matters more than any season after it — and the first season is also the one where money comes in between December and April while the bills arrive every month.

The Founder's Pass solves that, and it is worth being open about the fact rather than dressing it up. You are paying early so that there is a year two. In return you never pay again.

There is a second reason. The most common complaint about the app most people use today is that there is no way to buy it outright. That seems fair. So this is us saying yes to it, once.

What you get

• Every feature behind the Season Pass, today and in future: the coverage map, replay, rivalry records across seasons, season aggregates, offline maps, creating championships.
• Everything the free tier has, which is the entire daily game, and always will be.
• No renewal, no reminder email, no lapse. It does not expire when your card does.

What it does not cover

One carve-out, stated now rather than discovered later.

If a future feature carries a direct per-user fee paid to somebody else, it may be offered separately. The concrete case we can already see is AI-written day commentary: every recap is a model call with a real cost attached, and a feature that costs money every single time it runs is a different kind of thing from one that costs 7p a year to host.

If that ever happens, we will say so in the app, explain the cost, and Founders will get it cheaper than anybody else. What we will not do is quietly move an existing Season Pass feature into a new tier — anything covered on the day you bought is covered permanently.

What "lifetime" means

The lifetime of the app, not the lifetime of the buyer. Nobody can promise you sixty years of software. We are not going to be the company that implies it.

If Powdium stops, the wind-down commitment applies to you exactly as it applies to everyone: at least 180 days of notice spanning a complete ski season, everything working throughout, and your entire history in an open documented format with an open source reader that already exists today.

That document is linked from the purchase screen. Selling a lifetime promise without saying what happens when the lifetime ends is how you earn the reputation this whole project was started to avoid.

If Powdium is sold

The Founder's Pass binds any successor. If this is acquired, wound up into another company, or its assets are transferred, the pass survives on the same terms, and that condition goes into the sale documents rather than being left to goodwill.

This is the clause that matters most, and it is the one lifetime deals usually lack. The ordinary way a lifetime purchase dies is not a company failing — it is a company being bought by somebody with a subscription target who discovers that "lifetime" was only ever a promise from people who no longer work there.

If a buyer will not accept it, that tells you what the buyer intends, and it is better to find that out during a negotiation than to find it out afterwards.

The rules

The counter is public because it should be: a scarcity claim nobody can check is a marketing tactic, and one anybody can check is a fact. If we sell 1,000 the button goes away, and if we only sell 300 the number will say 300.

No second batch, no "Founder's Pass 2", no anniversary revival. The whole value of this is that it was once. Reissuing it later would be a small, cheap way to make every original buyer feel stupid, and the money would not be worth it.

What we are giving up

Honest accounting, since we are asking for trust.

A thousand people who might each have paid £19.99 a year for a decade is roughly £200,000 of subscriptions not collected, against £84,150 received now. On paper that is a bad trade.

It is the right one anyway, for three reasons. The cash arrives when it decides whether there is a second season, and money in December is worth more than money that may never exist. Honouring a pass costs about seven pence a year, so there is no ongoing burden to resent later. And a thousand people who have paid £99 have a genuine stake in their friends installing this — which, for an app that does not work until your friends are in it, is worth more than the subscriptions.

This page is a commitment. If it ever contradicts what the app does, the app is wrong and we want to know.