Conscious consumerism, made practical
You already buy toothpaste, coffee, jeans, electricity and a place to keep your money. That ordinary spending is one of the most powerful tools you own. Dollar Compass scores the companies behind those everyday choices — plainly, fairly, and with the sources shown — so you can move your money toward the solutions and feel genuinely settled about it.
No accounts, no tracking, no cost. A plain static site you can host anywhere — every page works from a folder in public_html.
Why this works
Sustainability often gets framed as sacrifice. The opposite is truer: when money keeps arriving from customers who care, the companies doing the right thing get to grow, hire, scale their clean processes and lower their prices — while the laggards feel the pressure to catch up.
As the good ones get bigger, something else grows too: their voice. Bigger budgets, bigger supply chains, more jobs, and far more influence over the rules that decide whether our air is clean, our water is safe, our soil is alive and our neighbourhoods are peaceful.
This is the whole idea in one line: buy from the solutions until the solutions are the establishment.
Healthy soil holds carbon and water. Regenerative farms are one place your grocery money can go.
The ripple
Four steps, and none of them require you to be an activist. They only require you to shop.
You swap one or two habitual purchases for a brand that scores better on the things you care about.
Revenue rises. It hires, invests in cleaner equipment and drops its prices, making the good option the easy option.
Competitors lose shelf space and copy the standards — or risk being left behind by the customers they were counting on.
Bigger companies get heard on policy. When the solutions are the ones being heard, clean air, clean water and peaceful, prosperous communities get easier to legislate.
The same idea, one step further
Everything on this site is about money you spend. The money you keep and invest is often the bigger lever, because it is lent out and reinvested for decades. We do not rate funds, portfolios or advisers here, so instead of scoring them we link out to a firm, through an affiliate link. The notice below explains what that means.
A fair spread
A scorecard is only useful if it disagrees with itself. Here is a leader, a work in progress and a clear place to redirect spending — each with the reasoning right there on the card.
How the scoring works
We score each company out of 100 on five pillars, then combine them with fixed weights. Nothing is hidden in a black box, and every company page lists the sources behind its numbers.
Grades are deliberately generous at the top and honest at the bottom — nobody is perfect, and almost everyone can improve.
What a low grade is not: a verdict on the people who work there, or a demand that you feel guilty. It is an invitation — usually the cheapest, most effective pressure you can apply.
Your first ten minutes
Where your savings and current account sit may matter more than a year of groceries, because banks decide what gets built. A local credit union keeps the lending in your area and gives you a vote — or compare a fossil-free option in the Banking category.
Coffee, soap, snacks, socks. Pick your two highest-frequency purchases and change only those. Habit spending is where leverage lives — and for fresh food, the shortest supply chain is the one nearest you.
A short, specific, polite message to a company you already pay is unreasonably effective. We give you the words and the address.
Even closer to home
A farmers market and a credit union both cut out the shareholder layer entirely. The money never leaves your area, and the people who decide what happens to it are the people who live there. Both finders below work straight from your ZIP code.
Pick your produce a few miles from where it grew. More of each dollar stays with the grower, food is fresher and comes with less packaging, and small market farms are far likelier to be organic or regenerative.
Your account balance is the largest vote you cast, because the bank lends it out again. A credit union is member-owned: you get a vote, the surplus comes back to members, and the lending tends to stay local.
Grow the compass
The best contributions come from people who actually shop somewhere and want it rated. Add a company, tell us what you know, and point us at a source. Anyone can contribute — no account needed.
Peace of mind
Nobody scores an A across their whole life, and the goal was never guilt. The goal is a quiet, well-founded confidence that the money you were going to spend anyway is nudging the world toward clean air, clean water, living soil, and neighbourhoods where people have the chance to prosper. That confidence is available to you this week, with the shopping list you already have.