How a reading is worked out

Nine short screens: where you live and what your home had when you were a kid; your age band and whether you are the first in your family to do something; where your money comes from and how long it would last; what comes in each month now and around this time last year; who you live with and who depends on you; how many days you were active; your health and sleep, if you choose to answer, which stay on your device; what happened this year and what you are after; and a guess at which way you moved. Every answer is a tap on a list. The country list can be narrowed by typing a few letters, and that text is never stored or sent.

Because without it we would be describing your country rather than you. A reading compares you with a year ago, and that needs a starting position: reconstructing one from your present income carried no information about the person — everybody in a country came out with the same score. So the same screen that asks what comes in now asks what came in around this time last year, and that answer is what makes the number yours.

This is the question moving asks, and it is the one this product was built around. A reading runs inside one country: its own distribution, its own currency, its own bands, with prices rebased so a gain is a real gain. Pick where you live now, and answer the earlier-income question with the band that money would have put you in there. A single reading never mixes two countries. With an account, a reading taken in each country can be read side by side as a crossing: where you stood in the one, and where you stand in the other.

A measurement is banded selections and nothing else — no name, no exact salary, no date of birth, nothing typed — and it stays anonymous unless you sign in. Nothing asks you to before you have a number: the offer sits on the result card, under it, and the header carries a quiet link for someone coming back to an account they already have. Sign in with Google, or with an email address and a password, which is stored only as a salted hash and opens once the address is verified; Apple sign-in is not available yet. With Google we keep a stable account id, the address it verified and the name on the account; with a password, the address and, if you give one, a display name. We write to that address only about the account itself: the verification code, a password reset, receipts if you subscribe, and notices you can turn off. A public name, or a line about yourself, is yours to add afterwards or to leave empty.

Every figure is computed in a pure module from tables we store ourselves, drawn from the World Bank, the OECD, the IMF and the World Inequality Database. A language model writes the sentence around the number and is structurally unable to write the number: the copy carries a placeholder, and code substitutes the figure. The working behind any reading is one tap from the card.

You, earlier. The reading is your own position and your own ground at two points in time, and the movement between them. There is no leaderboard, no percentile of other users, and nothing that ranks one person against another.

The measurement, the card, the archetype, all nine designs, the image download, the share link and the comparison with a friend are free, permanently, for everyone. Nothing in that list is watermarked, view-limited or held back. Betteria Plus is an optional paid tier for people who want more depth — their line across months, and what would change their number. Its price is set by billing country and shown in the pricing section, and nothing free is taken away to make room for it.

You get the same card. Roughly half of all readings will be level or down, and the decline variants have the same type sizes, the same care and a name written to be worth keeping. Direction is carried by a sign, a glyph and a word — never by a colour that says something has gone wrong.

The lifetime horizon measures from where someone with your starting point typically began, so it has something to compare to before you have a salary history. The short horizons need an earlier income band, which is one of the questions. Where the data is thin, the card says so rather than quietly inventing precision.

About a minute and a half on a phone. Nine short screens, every answer a tap, and a tap answers in the same frame — nothing on the path waits on a network request.