Ten principles binding Waste PBC and any successor entity. These commitments are written into the company's certificate of incorporation, its customer master agreement, and its software license. Three layers, chosen so that no single change of ownership, board composition, or executive will can undo them.
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Vendor portability is bedrock
Haulers bring their own payment processor, their own email vendor, their own SMS vendor. Steward integrates with whatever the hauler chooses, with zero markup and zero gatekeeping. The platform is the assembly point. It is never a tollbooth. A hauler's existing vendor relationships continue uninterrupted, forever. This principle alone disqualifies the SaaS-rollup playbook.
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Public published pricing, no shadow tiers
Steward charges from a small number of public tiers (Residential, Commercial, Commercial plus Materials). Each tier has a published per-active-customer rate and a published floor, all visible on a single pricing page. Tier assignment is transparent. Criteria are published, and assignment is by self-declaration verified against platform data. No back-room enterprise discounts that disadvantage smaller haulers. No hidden tiers. No "call for pricing." Annual increases capped at CPI plus 1%, in writing. Founder-customer rates locked in perpetuity. The pricing page is the contract.
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Open data exit at all times
Any hauler can export 100% of their data, in standard formats, at any time, for any reason. Export is a self-serve product feature, never a 30-day support ticket. The schema is documented. The export is signed for integrity. Steward never holds a hauler's data hostage. This is the structural answer to "what if I want to leave?" You can, today, and the door is held open.
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Innovation forcing function and cost transparency
A minimum percentage of annual revenue (target: 40%) is reinvested into product development. The remainder is distributed transparently across operating costs, modest founder and team compensation, and a small surplus reserve. The annual stewardship report discloses, for each pricing tier, the aggregate infrastructure cost per tenant, the aggregate revenue, and the resulting gross margin.
If gross margin in any tier exceeds 80% sustained for 12 months, this principle automatically triggers a pricing reduction in that tier, or equivalent reinvestment routed back to customers, such as service upgrades or included features that were previously paid. Surplus never flows to shareholder buybacks or dividend extraction. The platform is not a yield instrument. This is what non-predatory means in practice: auditable, publicly reported, charter-enforced.
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Hauler governance
A standing Hauler Advisory Board with structural input on roadmap, pricing, and policy. The board holds named veto authority over a defined set of decisions: price increases beyond CPI plus 1%, any attempt at vendor lock-in, anti-features that exploit users, material changes to data handling, and material changes to the charter itself. Seats rotate among the hauler customer base on a published cadence.
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Anti-acquihire commitments
If Waste PBC is sold, merged, or otherwise transitions ownership, the charter binds the successor entity. A sale that breaks any charter principle is voidable by the Hauler Advisory Board, and triggers a charter-defined remedy, which may include automatic open-sourcing of the codebase under a strong copyleft license. The platform's promises survive ownership. Ownership does not survive breaking the promises.
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API surface stays open
Full API access, including all writes, all reads, webhooks, and MCP server access, is included in the base price. There is no premium API tier, ever. The hauler IT lead can build against Steward without paying tribute. Rate limits exist for operational fairness only, never as a paywall.
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Source-available, with public-release triggers, and proactive open-source contribution
Two commitments, one principle.
(a) Source-available, with public-release triggers. Steward's full source code, the integrated product, is held under a source-available license (BSL-style or similar) with explicit public-release triggers: company dormancy, exit from the hauler industry, breach of charter, or sale to a buyer the Hauler Advisory Board rejects. The platform cannot be held hostage. Haulers always have the option to fork and self-host if the entity fails them.
(b) Strategic primitives open-sourced proactively. Specific Steward components, including adapter libraries, the domain event catalog, the MCP server reference, the vendor port framework, the multi-tenant row-level-security patterns, the legacy-system CSV parsers, and the calm-UX primitive library, ship under Apache 2.0 or MIT licenses during normal operation, and not only on failure. These are industry primitives whose value compounds when shared, and whose openness is structural proof that the charter is real. The closed-source moat is the integrated product itself: UX composition, optimization core, billing engine, AI copilots, workflow surface, customer portal. The plumbing underneath is shared with the industry.
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No dark patterns, ever
Explicit prohibitions in the product policy: no manipulative pricing presentations, no forced upgrades, no engagement tactics that exploit users, no surprise auto-renewals, no contract-by-confusion. Cancellation is as easy as signup. The Hauler Advisory Board reviews UX for dark-pattern drift annually.
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The promise survives ownership
Every charter principle above is binding on successor entities through certificate of incorporation provisions, customer master agreements, and license terms. Even if the company is sold, even if a future board reorganizes the entity, even if an acquirer buys it for strategic reasons, the commitments above survive. The remedy if they don't is source-code release, board veto, and charter-bound restitution. This is what uncorruptable means in practice. A layered legal architecture, designed to make extraction either impossible or unprofitable.