Membership is a use-and-ownership relationship, not an investment and not a passive bet. You patronize the co-op by using its services, you hold real voting power, and any profit comes back to you as a rebate on your own use. Here's exactly how it works — and the legal reason it's built this way.
You patronize the co-op by using its services — dedicated sovereign access on fungible compute, including your own hardware. Patron members hold the majority of voting power and elect the majority of the board. Membership is conditioned on actual use; that condition is what keeps it use-motivated and therefore outside securities law.
Majority control · Forman-cleanContributes capital for a capped return and a minority voice that cannot — under ULCAA's two-tier voting — ripen into control. This class is optional. When used at all, it's admitted only through a deliberate, disclosed, exempt securities offering. The default plan does not rely on it.
Optional · Disclosed · CappedTo be clear, and on purpose: membership is a use-and-ownership relationship, not an investment and not a passive bet. The cooperative sells sovereign access, continuity, and a genuine vote — never a financial return. This is the honest pitch, and it's also the sound one: an interest bought to use a thing rather than to profit from others' efforts is not a security. That's the Forman shield, and it's what protects you, the community, and the mutual ownership at the core.
You don't get bigger by joining. You stop being alone.
Isolated, dedicated use of the stack on compute you control — your own hardware, co-op-arranged bare-metal, or a mix. Swappable by design, so you're never locked to a provider.
Not a detachable add-on — it's structural. Security currency, model migration as the frontier moves, and a continuously refreshed template library, so your stack never quietly decays.
Patron members elect the board majority and hold growing voice over operations, pricing, and service. Democratic control isn't decorative here — it's the defining feature of a cooperative.
Any profit reaches you as a rebate proportional to your use — a return of margin to a user, not a dividend on an investment. A rebate on your own use — the cooperative way.
Prefer to own it outright with no subscription? A perpetual-license tier exists, scaled by deployment size — operator tier or business tier — sold standalone or bundled into a deployment.
Base (security + model-currency patches), standard (adds template updates + priority support), and premium (adds hands-on model migration, custom templates, and direct founder access).
We open a "get off rented inference" conversation: what breaks if your account is suspended, what a price increase costs you, what confidentiality or residency risk you already carry. The audit is the wedge.
A fixed-scope engagement: assess your workloads and hardware, deploy and harden the stack, integrate it with your data and tools, load the relevant templates, and hand over with documentation and training.
At handover, the deployment converts into an ongoing, use-motivated relationship: dedicated sovereign access with maintenance attached. You're now a patron member — an owner and a voter.
You elect the board majority and gain real, growing voice over operations, pricing, and service — and your patronage refunds track your use from there on.
Founding cohort: the first one to three operators are signed as charter patron members, and the product is built against your real requirements — with your money, not on spec.
Colorado's ULCAA permits a cooperative to keep control with patron members regardless of how much investor capital is admitted. Fundamental actions require a separate majority of patron-member votes. Patron voting power can be allocated other than one-member-one-vote, and reserved classes and board seats are permitted — the statutory basis for the founders holding working control without extinguishing member voice.
But there's a deliberate ceiling. Democratic control is a defining feature of a cooperative; entrenchment heavy enough to make the founders permanent rulers over a voiceless base would threaten the co-op's tax status and betray the whole point. So the resolution is precise:
The asset the founders most need to protect sits outside the co-op entirely. The less they must win every internal fight, the more genuinely democratic the co-op can be — and the more durable the whole arrangement is.
The cooperative returns value to its patrons and redeems member capital at or near par. It is not a vehicle for equity appreciation, and it isn't meant to be. Your value lives in the access and ownership you hold — sovereign use of the stack, a real vote, and patronage refunds on your use.
The appreciation a cooperative can't deliver lives in the founder-owned IP company, which is exactly why that company exists as a separate entity. Splitting the two is what lets the co-op be a genuine cooperative — yours — while keeping the founder's equity upside somewhere a cooperative was never going to provide it.
We sell you sovereign access, continuity, and a genuine vote — never a financial return. That's not a limitation we're apologizing for. It's the thing that makes your ownership real and the whole structure sound.
Read deeper: The Charter · The Three in depth · The numbers & sources
Request an invitation to the founding cohort. The first members shape the product — and the bylaws — against their own real requirements.