Frequent Questions

This trip matters to you, and we're not going to pretend that's up for debate. For a lot of people, experiencing the concert live isn't optional in any way a simple ‘don’t go’ answer respects. What we can actually do is help people see the real carbon and the cost of carbon credits for different transit options. Over time, we're hoping that seeing that data makes it easier to choose less carbon-intense travel: a train over a short-haul flight, carpooling instead of riding solo, or taking local public transportation. Buying carbon credits is for travel that only has one real way to make happen, or trips you were always going to take regardless. Not a permission slip, and not a substitute for reducing what can actually be reduced. The honest next-best thing for what's left after that.

Honestly, in a lot of ways, yes. The most sensible place for this cost to sit is further upstream: a real price on the fossil fuels that caused it, built into a gasoline tax, funded public transit, or baked into the price of the flight itself before you ever see a fare. None of those things are happening at the pace this actually needs.

In September 2026, the UN Environment Programme reported, in Limiting Overshoot: Navigating Exceedance, that the world is now on track to exceed the 1.5°C warming limit set in the Paris Agreement within the next few years, not avoid it. The conversation among climate scientists has shifted from preventing that from happening to managing the overshoot: how high it goes, for how long, and how the world gets back down.

We think that changes what “waiting for the system to catch up” actually costs. So we're choosing to take responsibility for this piece of it now, ourselves, rather than wait for producers, governments, or airlines to move first. That doesn't let them off the hook. We still think the responsibility for this belongs upstream, and we'll keep saying so. We just don't think they're going to move fast enough on their own, and we're not willing to wait and see.

Thrivedom is a Delaware Public Benefit Corporation, a for-profit company legally mandated to balance shareholder interests with a binding public-benefit purpose. We aren't asking for a charitable donation, and it isn't tax-deductible. You are paying for a real, commercial service. Think of it like a festival site-restoration fee. When thousands of fans gather for a weekend, we wear down the grass and leave a lot behind. The fee doesn't un-step on the grass: it pays crews to sweep the grounds, hand-sort what's left so it stays out of landfill, and get the park ready for the next show. Carbon credits work a little differently. They don't pull your trip's emissions back out of the air; they pay for verified projects elsewhere that stop or remove other emissions, like crews that collect and destroy old refrigerants that would otherwise be likely to leak. So we estimate your trip's emissions, buy and retire verified carbon credits equal to that estimate, and show you exactly which projects they came from. Our certificate of incorporation defines our mandate directly: ‘to reduce the carbon impact of attending live events and enable attendees to take collective climate action through carbon offsetting and community participation.’ That isn't marketing copy. It's our legal charter.

Funding a carbon credit is a way of taking responsibility for emissions that already happened, by paying to fund an equivalent reduction or removal of carbon somewhere else. A carbon credit (sometimes called a carbon offset) represents one tonne of CO2e that a specific project has kept out of the atmosphere or removed from it. Many different types of projects generate carbon credits, including super-pollutant destruction, methane-capture systems, reforestation, biochar and biomass carbon removal and storage, among others. An independent verifier checks the project's work, and a registry issues one credit, with its own serial number, for each tonne. When you buy through Thrivedom, you get credits equal to your trip's estimated emissions: usually from tonnes we've already bought and retired, otherwise from the next tonne we buy and retire. “Retiring” a credit means the registry permanently marks it as used, so it can't be sold, transferred or claimed by anyone else. Retirements are public records.

Every credit we buy has to meet the same bar, whichever project it comes from. It must be issued on a registry approved under CORSIA, the scheme the UN's aviation body (ICAO) runs for the carbon credits airlines are required to buy, or on Puro.earth for durable carbon removal. So it's not a bar we made up ourselves. That approval covers the registry, not every credit on it, so we add our own checks: each credit must carry the Core Carbon Principles (CCP) label or an independent quality rating, and be delivered and ready to retire. We never sell forward or pre-delivery tonnes. We retire credits on the public registry with their serial numbers, in the name of Thrivedom PBC on behalf of our customers, with our batch reference. For each project, we publish its method, location, vintage, durability and verification status on our project disclosures page.

Registries issue credits in whole tonnes, and most trips are a fraction of one. So we buy and retire tonnes ahead of time and match each purchase to specific tonnes. If orders outpace what we've retired, the rest goes to the next tonne we buy and retire. Credits are retired in the name of Thrivedom PBC on behalf of our customers, not in your personal name. You can see how it adds up on our transparency page: every tonne we've bought, with its registry and serial number, and the receipts matched to it, with the kg from each (receipt IDs are partially masked, so you can spot your own).

No, and we won't pretend otherwise. A credit represents a tonne of CO2e kept out of the atmosphere or removed from it somewhere else, at a different time. It isn't a molecule-for-molecule undo of your flight, and buying credits doesn't make your trip carbon neutral. Credit quality also varies a lot across the market. That's why we only buy credits that carry the Core Carbon Principles (CCP) label or an independent quality rating, and retire them on a public registry, where every retirement has its own serial number. It's not perfect. It's a way to take responsibility for emissions that already happened, done as carefully and as checkably as we know how, after reducing what you can: a train over a short flight, a shared car over driving solo.

Some do, and it's worth knowing exactly what “some” means. Dozens of airlines worldwide offer some version of a voluntary offset or sustainable-fuel checkbox at or near booking, everyone from JAL to Qantas to Lufthansa. But it's opt-in, it's usually easy to miss, and it stops at your name on that one reservation. It doesn't know you're going to a show, doesn't know anyone else going with you, and whatever the airline may be tracking on their end, none of it comes back to you as something you can actually see or feel part of.

There's a separate thing happening in the background that's easy to confuse with this: under a UN aviation scheme called CORSIA, airlines have to offset some of their emissions on international flights. Since 2021 that has applied only to flights between countries that volunteered; from 2027 it covers most international flights. Domestic flights aren't covered at all, and on the flights it does cover, airlines only offset a share of their emissions, based on how much international flying has grown compared with 2019. It's an annual total, not a per-flight purchase, so it doesn't mean your specific flight is offset in full. That's real and it matters, but it's an airline's cost of doing business, folded into ticket prices generally.

What Thrivedom does differently: it's built around the show itself, not the flight in isolation. You log how you actually got there, a flight, a drive, a train, or transit, not just the flight case an airline checkbox assumes. That becomes part of a running total everyone attending the tour can see grow together. It's not a number that hides in your own booking confirmation. Bringing people with you? Tell us how many, and their share comes along with yours, instead of everyone needing their own separate checkbox.

When you fund credits for the community pool, whether through the “Want to help fund credits for other ARMY's trips too?” prompt or the optional add-on at checkout, your contribution becomes grams of CO2e, allocated to verified credits we've already bought or committed to buy. (We buy credits in whole tonnes and match everyone's grams to them.) Pool credits aren't earmarked in advance for any one person's trip. They go toward funding credits for fans who took lower-carbon transit and logged that trip, but didn't buy credits for it themselves. This is a purchase, not a donation, and it isn't tax-deductible.

Behind the scenes, the pool tracks which contributions are matched to which logged trips, a real match, not just a shared bucket. We just don't show that pairing to either side, to protect privacy. We buy and retire credits ahead of time, in whole tonnes on the registry, and allocate your grams to them when you contribute. If contributions outpace what we've already retired, the extra grams go to the next tonne we buy and retire. Pool grams are matched as fans log trips. During the pilot, each tour has one pool. Any pool credits still unmatched when the tour ends are still retired credits: they count toward the travel of fans who attended that tour but never logged a trip with us. We expect far more of that unlogged travel than there are pool credits, so your contribution still matters to the broader community.

Our emission factors come from DEFRA, the UK government's environment department. Where DEFRA doesn't publish a factor we need, such as the extra emissions from a connecting flight, an RV's fuel use or a charter plane's empty return leg, we use our own stated assumptions and keep them separate from DEFRA's. DEFRA publishes updated factors once a year, typically each June, and we version them: your trip is always calculated against the factor set that was actually in effect on your travel date, so a number stays accurate to what was true then, even after DEFRA updates its figures later.

The core math is simple: carbon emissions approximately equal the distance traveled times the emission factor for how you traveled. DEFRA publishes separate factors for flying, driving, trains, and local transit, since each mode has a different real-world emissions profile per mile or kilometer. Distance itself is our best estimate, not a certainty: we won't always know the exact route you actually took, whether that's where a layover flight connected, which of several possible roads a drive followed, or which specific bus or train line you rode when more than one option existed. Flight distance comes from actual airport coordinates, driving distance comes from real road routing (not a straight line, since roads rarely are one), and for trains and transit we use the best routing data available and a reasonable approximation where a clean route doesn't exist. It's the best number we can calculate from what you tell us, not a claim that we tracked your literal path.

Flights get a bit more detail, since they usually carry the biggest share of a trip's footprint. Cabin class changes the number: business and first class take up more physical space per seat, so DEFRA assigns them a larger share of a flight's total emissions than economy gets. A connecting flight adds real emissions a direct one doesn't, since every extra takeoff and landing is its own emissions event, so we add an adjustment on top of the base distance calculation to account for it rather than treating a one-stop and a nonstop covering the same distance as identical. And flights create warming beyond their CO2 alone: contrails and other high-altitude effects add to the real impact. We follow DEFRA's standard practice of applying a 1.7x adjustment to flight emissions to account for this, on top of the CO2 figure itself. It's why a flight's number can look larger than a CO2-only calculation would show: it's a more complete one, not an inflated one. That adjustment applies to flights specifically. It isn't used for driving or transit, since it accounts for an effect that's specific to emissions released at altitude.

Driving works a little differently. We calculate a car trip's full emissions, then divide by how many people were actually in the car, since that's the honest per-person share of a shared ride. We default new trips to one person, and assume a direct flight when a flight's involved, since asking every detail up front would slow the calculator down, but most of these assumptions (cabin class, connections, who else was in the car) are shown plainly on the calculation screen. One exception, worth being upfront about: for transit trips, we infer whether you took something local (a subway or city bus) or something longer-distance (an intercity train or coach) from the distance itself, since the calculator doesn't yet ask which kind of transit you used. That's a real heuristic, and it isn't shown or correctable today. Every calculation is logged against the exact DEFRA factor version used, so we can always show our work on the parts we do ask about.

Independent research finds that fan travel, not production, staging, or artist/crew logistics, is the biggest source of live music's carbon footprint. MIT Climate Machine's December 2025 study, analyzing 80,000+ real events across the U.S. and U.K., found fan travel accounts for 62% of live-music emissions in the U.S. and 77% in the U.K. REVERB's Concert Travel Study, surveying 35,000+ fans across 400+ North American shows, separately found fan travel generates roughly 38x more emissions than artist/crew travel, hotels, and gear transport combined.

You pay a per-kg price for your trip's estimated CO2e, plus a US$0.50 flat fee on smaller orders. Today's rate, and what counts as a smaller order, are on our transparency page, and you always see the exact price before you pay. That buys and retires verified carbon credits equal to your trip's estimated emissions. Prices are set in US dollars. If you pay in another currency, Stripe converts the total at its exchange rate, which includes a conversion fee. You can also choose to pay in US dollars.

Why that price. A tonne of CO2 keeps causing harm for decades: heat, floods, lost harvests, people's health. Economists try to put a price on that harm, and their answers differ mostly on one question: how much weight to give the people who'll live with that harm later, including everyone still going to shows decades from now. Here's what the research says:

• The cost of the harm: about US$50–66 a tonne
  • Source: Barrage & Nordhaus, PNAS, 2024 (in 2019 dollars).
  • What it means: An update of DICE, the long-standing climate-economy model developed by William Nordhaus, who shared the 2018 Nobel prize in economics for this work. It gives US$66 a tonne if today's policies continue, and US$50 in a scenario where every country cuts emissions as much as makes economic sense.
• The cost of the harm, with newer evidence: about US$185 a tonne
  • Source: Rennert et al., Nature, 2022 (in 2020 dollars).
  • What it means: A study led by Resources for the Future that updated how the harm is estimated, with newer evidence on health, farming, energy use and sea-level rise, and a lower discount rate than older estimates, so harm decades from now counts for more. US$185 is its central estimate. The range around it is wide (US$44–413), because so much about the future is uncertain.
• The cost of cutting emissions fast enough: about US$90 a tonne by 2030
  • Source: the UN's climate panel, the IPCC (Sixth Assessment Report, Working Group III, Chapter 3, 2022, in 2015 dollars).
  • What it means: A different kind of number. It's not the harm, but what it would cost to cut emissions quickly enough to keep warming below 2°C.

We set our target at the low end of these estimates, then chose a mix of credits that fits within it, so our price sits just under the lowest of them. It stays within reach for most trips. Paying it doesn't undo that harm. It funds verified climate projects.

How we spend it. 20% of the per-kg price is Thrivedom's service fee. We use the other 80% only for carbon credits. Most of it buys and retires the credits for your purchase. After that, a little is left over, currently under 1% of the price. Each month, we add up what's left over from every purchase and use it to buy extra durable removal for the community pool. We buy credits in whole tonnes and keep some stock on hand. If we're ever left with unsold stock, for example when we change suppliers, we cover its cost from our fee, not your credits. The monthly figures are on our transparency page. We buy two kinds of credits:

• Destruction credits, from projects that collect and destroy potent greenhouse gases, such as old refrigerants, that would otherwise be likely to leak.
• Durable removal, from projects that take carbon out of the air and store it for centuries or longer.

Destruction credits cost much less per tonne, so they make up most of the credits we buy for you. That's what lets us fit a small share of durable removal, which costs far more, into the same price, while the total still equals your trip's estimated emissions. Today's exact mix, our suppliers and every credit we've retired are on our transparency page.

Will this change? Probably. Credit prices move, new suppliers join, and we're still learning what works for fans, so the price and the mix may change, and we may offer different options. What stays the same:

• You see the exact price before you pay.
• Price changes never apply to purchases you've already made. The mix of a past purchase changes only in the cases on our project disclosures page: if credits allocated to it can't be bought or retired, or are later cancelled and replaced.
• Every change is posted, with its date, on our transparency page, alongside every credit we retire and its registry serial number.

About our fee. Our 20% covers card processing, tax compliance and accounting, hosting, support, and buying and tracking every credit. It also helps us reach more fans and build a business that lasts. Purchases under 100 kg, and chip-ins under US$4.90, also pay a US$0.50 flat fee, which helps cover the fixed cost of processing small payments. Thrivedom is a Public Benefit Corporation, so our mission is part of our legal charter. We're a company, not a charity, so purchases aren't tax-deductible donations.

Buying credits doesn't erase your trip's emissions. It puts a price on them and pays for verified climate projects. Reduce what you can first, then buy credits for what's left.

Yes. You can cancel (withdraw from) any purchase within 14 days of buying it and get back everything you paid, for any reason, wherever you live.

How to cancel. Go to your receipts, open the purchase, and choose “Withdraw from this purchase”, then confirm. Or reply to your receipt email, or email hello@thrivedom.co, saying you want to cancel. Either way, we'll email you a confirmation with the date and time. You can also use our withdrawal form.

What you get back. The full amount you paid. It goes back to the same card or payment method, in the currency you paid in. We start the refund right away, and banks usually take 5 to 10 business days to show it.

What happens to the credits. We buy and retire credits ahead of time, and a retirement can't be undone. So the credits your purchase paid for go back into our stock and fill the next fan's order. We pay the card fees. Your trip stays logged and shows as unpaid. If it's a low-emissions trip, it goes back into the pool queue to wait for a match.

Pool contributions. The same 14 days apply. If you cancel, the credits go back into our stock, and any trips your contribution was matched with go back to waiting for a match.

After 14 days. Email hello@thrivedom.co and we'll look at it case by case.

If your estimate goes down. If you later correct your trip and the estimate drops, the difference goes to the community pool to fund credits for other fans' trips. It isn't refunded. You can still cancel the whole purchase within its 14 days.

If a payment went wrong. For a duplicate charge, or a failed payment that still shows as pending, email hello@thrivedom.co and we'll sort it out.