Born from a simple question
We asked ourselves: what if helping others were as easy as buying a pair of socks?
Helping others shouldn’t be a burden or a source of guilt. Most people mean to give and don’t, not because they don’t care, but because giving asks for a decision, a payment, and a moment of attention that rarely arrive at the same time
The detail that made it buildable was a commercial one. Stores already pay a commission for every customer sent to them — that money is spent whether or not anyone thinks about it, and it usually comes back to the shopper as cashback. Redirect it instead, and an ordinary purchase becomes a donation without anyone paying more or deciding anything at the moment of buying
That is the whole idea behind DariDobro: the purchase you were making anyway, the commission that was being paid anyway, pointed at a charity you chose once
What we insisted on
Two things were settled before anything was built. The donation cycle had to stay inspectable end to end — a purchase, a commission, a transfer, a document behind the transfer — because a charity product that asks for trust without evidence is not worth building. And it had to be effortless: if it takes attention every time, it becomes another thing to feel guilty about, which is the problem we started from
What it took
The order things got built in says something about the idea. The website and the admin panel came first, because a donation you cannot see the paperwork for is not worth building. Then the store feeds, so there was somewhere to shop. Then the PWA, then the browser extensions, so the thing could travel with people instead of waiting for them. Then the legal work, which is less quotable than the rest and took as long as any of it
Now we are onboarding charities, and that is the part no amount of engineering shortens. A Russian non-profit cannot simply be listed because we think its work is good — it has to agree to take part. So the catalogue fills at the speed of other people’s decisions, which is a strange, slow ending for a project that started with a question about how easy giving ought to be