Because the last ten years of this were mostly a sales pitch.

There has been a lot of money made selling people names on new namespaces, and remarkably little built for them to do afterwards. You bought a name. You could resell the name. That was the product.

We think that gets it backwards. A name is only interesting if things run on it — if it's where your mail arrives, where your page lives, and what people follow you by. So we built those first, on infrastructure we run and pay for, and then made the name itself free so the cost of trying it is your download time.

What that means in practice

• Free, and not as a trialThe name, the page, the mailbox and the social accounts. No card, no expiry timer.
• No crypto to deal withYou don't need a wallet, tokens, an exchange account or a seed phrase. There is nothing for you to buy and nothing for you to sign.
• Useful on day oneThe measure we hold ourselves to is whether a person who installs this ends up with something they'd actually use.
• Honest about the parts we runSome of this is decentralized and some of it is servers in a rack that we operate. Every page here says which is which.

If you want the mechanism rather than the pitch — how names are verified, how the certificate pinning works, how the services are run — it is documented at hns.one/docs.