Since November 2024, Vitextra contributes 1% of its revenue to permanent carbon removal. Every purchase of a Vitextra product — a web part, a subscription, a renewal — sends a small share to projects that take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and store it for good.
This post explains what that means, where the money goes and why we think a small software company should do this at all.
Why Carbon Removal Matters
Cutting emissions is the first job, and it is not optional. But even in the best scenarios the world keeps emitting for decades, and part of the CO₂ already in the atmosphere has to be taken back out to keep warming within safe limits. That is carbon removal: capturing CO₂ from the air or the ocean and locking it away in rock, soil, the deep ocean or long-lived products for hundreds or thousands of years.
Today these technologies are expensive and operate at a tiny scale. They become cheaper the same way solar panels did — through early customers who pay the high price now so that the industry can learn, grow and bring the cost down.
Our Commitment
We direct 1% of Vitextra's revenue to carbon removal through Stripe Climate, which pools contributions from thousands of businesses and buys removal from vetted projects via Frontier, an advance market commitment founded by Stripe, Alphabet, Shopify, Meta and McKinsey. The portfolio covers several approaches, so the contribution is not a bet on one technology:
Direct Air Capture
Machines filter CO₂ out of ambient air and inject it into geological storage. It works anywhere and is easy to measure, which makes it the reference point for the whole field — and currently the most expensive approach.
Enhanced Weathering
Crushed silicate rock is spread on farmland, where it reacts with CO₂ in rainwater and binds it as carbonate minerals. The process is natural; grinding the rock just makes it happen in years instead of millennia.
Biomass Carbon Removal & Storage
Plant material that would otherwise decompose and release its carbon — crop residues, forestry waste — is converted into bio-oil or biochar, or buried in conditions where it cannot rot, and so kept out of the carbon cycle.
Ocean Alkalinity Enhancement
Minerals added to seawater raise its capacity to absorb CO₂ from the air while counteracting acidification. The ocean is the largest carbon sink on the planet; this approach gives it a little more capacity.
Storage Only
Permanent geological storage for CO₂ captured elsewhere, so that capture projects without their own storage can still deliver a verified result.
Direct Ocean Removal
CO₂ is extracted from seawater, which then draws more from the air to restore the balance. Seawater holds far more CO₂ per volume than air, so the process can be more energy-efficient than air capture.
Projects are selected by independent scientific review for permanence, measurability and the ability to scale. We do not pick individual projects and we do not claim to offset our own emissions; the goal is to help the removal industry exist.
Supporting Emerging Technologies
Almost all of the companies in the portfolio are early-stage. Some will not succeed, and that is the point of a portfolio: money committed in advance lets the promising ones sign their first contracts, build their first plants and prove whether their approach works at scale.
A 1% contribution from a company of our size is small in absolute terms, but demand from many small buyers is exactly what these companies need to show investors and governments.
Engaging Our Community
The contribution is built into how we sell, so nothing is required from you: if you use Vitextra products, you are already part of it. If you want to do more — businesses that process payments through Stripe can join Stripe Climate in a few clicks and choose their own percentage; any company can buy removal directly from Frontier's suppliers or similar programs; and the simplest step of all is asking your own vendors what they do.
We are happy to share what we have learned. Contact us if you are considering a similar commitment.
Looking Ahead
The 1% is a floor, not a campaign. It stays in place as the company grows, and we will review the share as removal gets cheaper and our revenue changes.
We will also keep looking at the rest of our footprint — the energy behind the cloud services we run on and the way we work as a remote team — and write about it here when there is something worth reporting.
