How Mahhala makes money (and how it never will)

Every free platform eventually gets asked this question, and honest answers are rare enough that asking it has become a reflex. So here's ours, in full.

The one-sentence version: most discovery platforms monetize your browsing history. We monetize shelf space.

What shopping here costs you: nothing

Mahhala is free for shoppers, and not in the fine-print way. There's no cart and no checkout here. When you find something you love, we link you straight to the store that sells it, and we take no commission on anything you buy. We also don't charge you in the currency most "free" platforms quietly use: your data.

• We run no third-party trackers. No Google Analytics, no ad pixels, no social media buttons phoning home. Our analytics are first party, built to answer "is the site working" and "what's resonating", not "who are you".
• Promoted placements are fetched without your cookies. The ad service never sees them, by design.
• We never sell personal information. The Privacy Policy and Cookie Policy spell this out in plain English.
• There's no cookie consent banner because there's nothing to consent to.

We'll go a step further: use privacy tools if you like. Firefox, uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger, all of it. Mahhala works fine with every one of them enabled, and we've put a short privacy toolkit in the Help Center to get you started. A platform that needs you defenseless to make money has a business model problem.

Where the money actually comes from

Stores pay us, and only when they choose to. There are three ways.

Pro subscriptions. Every store gets what it needs to sell on Mahhala for free: a verified listing, live products, and full control of its page. A store that outgrows that can subscribe to Pro, a flat subscription that unlocks a larger catalog and the tools of a growing shop: product and search analytics, bulk imports, API access, team seats, and AI-assisted categorization. We charge for the workbench, not for the shelf.

Product promotions. A store can put a budget of its choosing behind a product to feature it in promoted slots around the site. Every one of those slots is labeled "Promoted", and the matching is contextual: based on what you're browsing right now, never on a profile of you, because no such profile exists.

Premium placements. A store can book the site-wide announcement bar or the home page hero for a calendar day, to spotlight a launch, a seasonal moment, or the store itself. These are exclusive, reviewed by a human before they run, and disclosed like everything else that's paid.

That's the whole list. No commissions, no data sales, no pay-to-rank.

Promotion never buys trending

Trending on Mahhala is earned from genuine engagement. Sponsored placements exist, are clearly labeled, and never buy their way into organic trends. A store can pay to be seen; it cannot pay to be loved.

What we'll never do

Business models drift, and promises that live in a founder's head drift with them. So we're writing ours down:

• We will never sell or share your personal information for advertising.
• We will never track you across other websites.
• We will never run unlabeled paid placement. If a store paid for a slot, you'll see "Promoted" on it. That disclosure is a commitment in our Terms of Service, not a style choice.
• We will never ask you to turn off a privacy tool to use the site.

As Mahhala grows, the ways we make money will grow too: new paid tools for stores, probably; new ways to promote a launch, maybe. New ways to spend your data, never. If a future revenue idea can't survive the four commitments above, it doesn't ship.

Questions? The Help Center covers the practical details, and the Privacy Policy is the binding version of everything above.