The nemo manifesto

The web is designed to make you stay. Nemo is designed to get you there.

Feeds, homepages, notifications, banners: most of the web measures its success by how long it manages to hold you.

Nemo measures the opposite. You arrive, do what you came to do, close.

Nemo means "nobody". It is the name Ulysses uses to free himself from the Cyclops and take back his own route. For us it means the same thing: slipping away from whatever tries to hold you, and owning your direction again.

We do not want to be another place to spend your time, another account to feed, another algorithm deciding what to show you. We want to stand between you and the web only long enough to remove what is not needed. Then disappear.

From this come a few choices that, for us, are not negotiable.

1.Your time is not our business model.

The web earns when you stay. Nemo works when you leave sooner.

We do not want to increase the time you spend inside a product. We want to reduce the time you lose getting where you wanted to go. Software that succeeds when you use it less is software on your side.

2.You already know where you want to go.

You should not have to search for how to get there. Homepages, menus, cookies, forms, in-between pages: anything standing between you and what you want to do is extra road. Nemo tries to remove it.

Type one line. Press Enter. You have arrived. Don't look for the site. Go where you're going.

3.What you don't want to lose shouldn't have to stay open.

Thirty-eight open tabs are not necessarily a mess. They are thirty-eight things you don't want to lose.

Nemo searches your open tabs, your closed ones and your history, so you can let them go without wondering whether you'll find them again. The browser stays light. The memory doesn't.

4.What you do in your browser is your business.

Searches across your tabs, your history and the pages you have visited are processed on your device. Nemo does not need to receive them to work.

No required account. No profile to build. No history shipped to our servers just to hand it back to you. It's not a privacy promise. It's the architecture.

5.We don't need to know who you are.

If a feature can work without asking for your name, email or identity, we don't ask. Every piece of data collected creates a new reason to store it, analyse it, protect it and, sooner or later, use it.

We prefer to start from the opposite question: can we do without it? Almost always, yes.

6.We earn in plain sight.

Some routes may contain affiliate links. If you book a hotel, buy a service or register a domain, nemo may receive a small commission without raising the price for you.

We don't want to hide that in a terms page nobody will read. If nemo earns from a route, it must be clear. And our incentive must stay the same as yours: getting you where you wanted to go, not convincing you to stay.

7.The route is yours.

Nemo means nobody. Not because it does nothing, but because it doesn't want to be the centre.

It doesn't decide where you go. It doesn't build a feed to hold you. It doesn't choose what you should see next. It doesn't try to call you back when you leave. It takes you where you wanted to go, then steps aside.

The code will be open too, because when we say nemo works a certain way, we want you to be able to verify it.

Every new feature has to pass one simple question: does it get you there sooner, or does it add noise? If it adds noise, we don't need it.