Why protection shouldn't be behind a paywall — and the moment that made it impossible to ignore.
My name is Jason. I'm the founder of Nudge.
This started with my grandma.
She was buying Christmas presents on a niche art website — the kind of small shop nobody would think twice about. Somewhere in that transaction, her debit card information got stolen. By the time anyone caught it, her account had been drained.
It took her months to get her money back. Months. For a transaction that should have taken seconds to verify.
That stuck with me. Not because it was unusual — but because it wasn't. The more I looked into it, the more I realized: this happens to hundreds to thousands of people every day. Same pattern. Same outcome. Same fight to recover something that should have been preventable in the first place.
And the part that really got me? Most of those people probably don't even know it could have been stopped. They just think this is what the internet is now. You shop, sometimes you lose, that's the cost.
I disagree with that. I don't think that should be the cost.
Here's the part that still doesn't sit right with me.
The internet is the single largest thing to happen to human society since electricity. Billions of people use it daily. Trillions of dollars move through it. Most of life — banking, shopping, communication, learning — now happens online.
And almost nobody is making sure people are protected on it.
The opposite, actually. Entire industries have developed from the lack of protection. Scammers, data harvesters, lookalike sites, fraud rings — they've built billion-dollar markets out of preying on regular people who don't know what to look for.
Meanwhile, the tools that could protect people? They cost money. Month after month. $50 here, $99 there, $14.99 every month forever. The companies selling them justify the price by pointing out that nobody else is doing this for free.
So you pay them. And only the part of your online life you can afford to protect, gets protected. The rest is open season.
It's just an odd concept. The biggest shift in human history, and the protection from its worst actors is sold by subscription.
Nudge is a free Chrome extension that shows real-time trust scores on websites. You install it once, and as you browse, it tells you whether the site you're on is legitimate.
It's not perfect. It doesn't catch everything. The deep technical analysis that bigger security tools offer — we're working toward that, but we're not there yet.
What it does do is solve the most common problem: helping regular people spot the obvious-but-easy-to-miss patterns. The fake URL that's off by one letter. The lookalike checkout page. The "outlet" site for a brand that doesn't have outlets. The kind of thing my grandma would have caught if someone had pointed it out.
That's the base layer. Free. Always.
The question I get asked most: how does Nudge make money?
Honest answer: affiliate revenue from a small number of high-trust retailers — Amazon, eBay, Walmart, Target, others. When users decide on their own to shop at one of these stores, we sometimes earn a small commission.
The rule I've made for myself, in writing, on this page, so you can hold me to it:
Affiliate relationships never affect trust scores. Ever.
A brand can pay Nudge $0 in commission and still score 95/100. A brand can pay 10% commission and still score 60/100. Scores are calculated from public data — BBB ratings, FTC actions, regulatory history, domain age, customer service patterns. The day affiliate money starts influencing scores is the day Nudge becomes worthless. So it can't happen. And it won't.
We also don't:
These aren't features. They're promises. The whole point is that protection shouldn't cost you anything — not money, not data, not privacy.
Nudge isn't finished. It's a starting point.
The trust scores work as a base. They catch most of what regular people need protection from. But there's a lot more to build — deeper technical analysis, more languages, browser support beyond Chrome, automated warnings on suspicious checkout pages, and more.
We'll build all of it, and it will all stay free. The mission isn't to build the most advanced security tool. It's to build the most accessible one. The one your grandma can use without thinking about it. The one a college student broke from rent can rely on. The one that exists because someone has to do this without putting it behind a wall.
If you've found Nudge useful, the best thing you can do is install it for someone older in your life. Set it up for them once. They'll never have to think about it again. That's the whole point.
The internet shouldn't be a place where only people with money are safe.
That's it. That's the whole reason this exists.