PledgeBank

» see pledgebank.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

The conditional promise is an old social technology and PledgeBank was the first website built entirely out of it. You wrote a sentence in a fixed shape, "I will do X, but only if N other people will do it too", set a deadline, and the site collected signatures. If the number came in, everybody was on the hook at once. If it did not, nobody was, and the pledge expired without anybody having to be the one person who showed up alone.

mySociety launched it on 13 June 2005, two years into the charity's life, and it became their most popular site within months. This was the organization that also built TheyWorkForYou and FixMyStreet, run out of London on grant money, writing open-source civic software with a small staff. PledgeBank was their first in-house project to get translated, and it went further than anyone planned: volunteers carried it into fourteen languages, from Simplified Chinese to Belarusian, Esperanto included.

The pledges that worked were smaller and stranger than the crowdfunding language of the following decade would suggest. Someone collected underwear for Liberian orphans, expecting a few family members to join, and closed at 753 pairs. A town got a library out of donated books, and somewhere a tree that was scheduled to come down did not. Over a thousand people pledged money together and created the Open Rights Group, which is still one of Britain's main digital-rights organizations and which exists because a website let a thousand strangers agree to pay at the same time. Tony Blair and Ken Livingstone both used it, pledging to become patrons of sports clubs, which is a sentence that only makes sense in 2006.

On 28 January 2015 mySociety posted "Goodbye to some old friends" and named four projects it was ending. The reasoning was plain and it was about focus rather than failure: the charity had to run its core sites and support its international partners, and could no longer afford to dedicate itself to the rest. PledgeBank stopped accepting new pledges in February, existing pledges could be signed until the end of June, and every pledge owner got an email saying the site would close then.

~ the record ~

~ the model, monetized by other people ~

mySociety's own farewell said it plainly: PledgeBank "predates Groupon, Kickstarter and similar pledging concepts" and never gained the same traction. That is the shape of the whole thing. Groupon launched in 2008 on a conditional promise with a price attached, the deal tips when enough buyers commit, and was briefly worth more than $16 billion. Kickstarter launched in 2009 on a conditional promise with a funding goal attached and became a verb.

PledgeBank had the mechanism four years early and took no cut of anything, because the pledges were mostly not about money. "I will clean up the canal if ten neighbors will" produces no transaction to skim. The commercial versions kept the mechanism and narrowed it to the one case where a payment changes hands, which is the difference between a charity project and a public offering.

~ what a charity can afford ~

The closure is a good record of what running civic software actually costs. mySociety was not shutting down a failure. PledgeBank had won a New Statesman New Media award in July 2006 and had real successes on the board, and it still had to go, along with FixMyTransport and HearFromYourMP in the same post. Old code needs maintenance, old sites need moderation, and volunteer hours do not cover either at the point where the grant renewal is being written.

The organization survived the decision. TheyWorkForYou and WhatDoTheyKnow are both still running in 2026, the second of them carrying something like a fifth of the Freedom of Information requests made to British ministerial departments.

~ the tombstone that still answers ~

Go to pledgebank.com today and the server returns 410 Gone, which is the correct status code and one almost nobody uses. 404 means the address was never here. 410 means it was here and it has been deliberately removed, and a web server has to be told to say that. mySociety configured it on purpose.

What it serves with the 410 is a full page in the original purple, explaining what PledgeBank was, listing the underwear and the library, and pointing to the Internet Archive for the pledges themselves. The file's last-modified header reads 7 August 2026.

Eleven years after the site closed, somebody at that charity is still editing the page that explains why it closed. Nothing else in this graveyard does that.

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