Most websites try to do more over time. More features, more content, more users, more engagement loops.
I wanted to see what would happen if I did the opposite.
So I built a site that will only ever show one public sentence.
That’s it.
No feed. No profiles. No infinite scroll. No accounts. Just one sentence that everyone sees when they visit the homepage.
When the site opens on New Years 2026, anyone will be able to change that sentence but only by paying more than the last person did. Whatever they pay becomes the new base price. The next person has to beat it.
Every overwrite will be logged permanently with a timestamp, price, and position in history.
Most websites try to do more over time. More features, more content, more users, more engagement loops.
I wanted to see what would happen if I did the opposite.
So I built a site that will only ever show one public sentence.
That’s it.
No feed. No profiles. No infinite scroll. No accounts. Just one sentence that everyone sees when they visit the homepage.
When the site opens on New Years 2026, anyone will be able to change that sentence but only by paying more than the last person did. Whatever they pay becomes the new base price. The next person has to beat it.
Every overwrite will be logged permanently with a timestamp, price, and position in history.
Why build something this constrained?
Because most of the internet removes friction from speech entirely. Posting is cheap. Deleting is easy. Context disappears. Consequences are temporary.
I’m curious what happens when you introduce three constraints at once:
• Scarcity: there’s only one slot
• Cost: participation isn’t free
• Permanence: history is public and immutable
Those constraints already change how people talk about the idea, and I’m interested to see how they change behavior once it’s live.
Early messages will probably be jokes. As the price rises, people may hesitate. Messages may get shorter. Intent may become clearer. Eventually, the cost itself could become part of the meaning of the sentence.
The same words feel different at $5 than they do at $5,000.
The mechanics (kept deliberately simple)
When it launches, the system will work like this:
• One sentence is visible at a time
• To overwrite it, you pay the current base price plus a per-character cost
• Whatever you pay becomes the next base price
• The price never decreases
• All past sentences are preserved forever in a public history
There are no growth hacks here. No retention tricks. The system is intentionally small so the behavior is easy to observe.
What I’m curious to learn
I don’t know if people will treat this as a joke, a billboard, a piece of art, or something else entirely.
What I want to observe is whether introducing cost and permanence changes:
• what people say
• how long they wait
• whether they feel ownership or hesitation
• how value alters language
If it fizzles out, that’s still a result.
If it turns into something people argue about, that’s interesting too.
This isn’t a startup (at least not in the usual sense)
I’m not trying to optimize this into a product with funnels and metrics. It’s closer to an experiment that happens to be implemented in code.
The goal isn’t growth. It’s observation.
Why I’m sharing this here
DEV has always been a place where people build strange things just to see what happens. This project comes from that same impulse: curiosity first, polish second, certainty last.
If you were building something intentionally small or constrained, what rule would you impose to meaningfully change user behavior?
Sometimes the most interesting systems aren’t the ones that grow fastest, but the ones that force people to pause.