How your Innovation Tokens work, and why they stay yours
If you support a product site on Swoin, your subscription gives you Innovation Tokens (InTo). What you do with them is entirely up to you. This post walks through how that works from your side as a supporter, and why I built it this way.
Where your InTo come from
You pick your monthly amount yourself, anywhere between €5 and €500. With every paid invoice you receive InTo: on your first payment and on every monthly renewal after that. The amount follows what you actually paid. €10 a month, for example, gives you 1,500 InTo each month.
You can change that amount, update your payment method, download your invoices or cancel, all on your own.
Where you can spend them
You can use your InTo on every product site you actively support. There are two ways:
Push a roadmap item. You put InTo behind a feature you want to see built:
Donate to a blog entry. You put InTo behind a post you found worth it:
How you split them is your call. Put everything on one feature on one product site while you subscribe to five others: totally fine. Spread them across all of them: also fine. Or save them for a few months and spend everything at once when the right feature shows up.
So here's the thing: you know best what matters to you. Some supporters care about one feature a lot. Others care about a little of everything. A token system that forces you to spend evenly, or to spend right away, would hide exactly that difference.
Your balance stays yours
Your InTo don't expire. There's no monthly reset, and nothing quietly disappears in the background.
If you cancel a subscription, you keep your InTo balance. You can keep using it on the other product sites you actively support. And you stay a full supporter on the product site you cancelled until the end of the period you already paid for. You can still read, discuss, push, donate and create feature requests.
You can also stop for a while. A month, or even a year. When you come back and subscribe again to a product site, or start supporting a different one, your saved InTo are there, ready to use.
There's one rule to know. Spending InTo on a product site, pushing or donating, requires an active subscription on that product site. The balance itself belongs to you either way. The right to spend it on a specific product site comes with supporting it.