The Yards Project
No tracking.
No reviews.
No paid placement.
No tiers.
No cut.
Coming soonWhy do I always
feel like
I'm being scammed?
Why is it that I spend every minute on the internet looking over my shoulder, checking whether every message, every comment, every website is trying to trick me? When did we get like this?
And worst of all, it’s become mainstream. Fleecing customers is now an accepted business tactic. And when buyers have their wallets emptied, they accept it as their own fault for not realising they were being fleeced.
Stop it. Just stop it. Just be a normal business, selling a normal product in a normal way.
I just want to
buy a mop.
I want to be able to shop without being followed by a pack of drooling wolves. I want to think about buying a mop without it triggering six weeks of adverts for mops.
I want to leave a website without a bot following me out, offering panicked discounts and begging for my email address.
‘Good morning, is there anything I can help you with today?’ ‘No thank you, I’m just browsing.’ That’s the end of the conversation. Stop following me around trying to catch my eye, you freak.
Instead of using terabytes of data to try to trick people into buying a shitty product, why don’t we just make a good product?
Skillyard, photographed on paper
Why this?
Why now?
We use AI. There, we said it. We're not ashamed. It's a tool that finally allows honest, small ventures to be built for sensible cost.
We don’t just give it a prompt and hit go. Skillyard and OpsYard have taken months, and hundreds and hundreds of hours of painstaking work. But before AI, directories like these would have cost hundreds of thousands. And that money would have to be recouped from the users. AI allows us to price for the smallest customer.
Two key
principles
Fairness
Nobody’s money or size buys them an advantage over anyone else using the same product. And nothing we gain from you should cost you more than it gains us.
This isn’t problem-free, of course. A fixed price is a smaller share of a large firm’s budget than a sole trader’s. No pricing structure fixes that without means-testing people, and we’re not going to do that. All we’re saying is that having more money won’t get you anything extra here. Here’s the product, this is the price. And that’s it.
Sufficiency
The products are allowed to be good and finished. We charge a fair price for them and stop.
The standard model out there on the internet is tiers. What’s the base version worth, what can be bolted on to charge more? What can be held back so releasing it becomes a revenue line? It’s so normal it barely registers with us. We reject that thinking. We’re not going open source, because things cost money, we create valuable products and we need to pay our bills too. But there is a position between free and fleecing.
Dig in.
Ask questions.
We stand by this.
Price reflects the product, not the buyer.
We set prices by asking what the product is worth, not by asking how much we could get for it. We’re not looking for the biggest return, we’re looking to deliver the biggest benefit. The price is set by what the smallest user can afford. And it’s the same for everyone.
We don’t profit from someone’s weak position.
White-labelling works because people can’t be found on their own. Commission models work because the middleman controls access to buyers. Tracking works because visitors have no practical way to refuse. In each case someone is profiting from an imbalance of power.
We collect only the data we absolutely need.
We’re not saying “we will never track”. But right now, none of our products track at all. If a future product needs accounts and history to work well for its users, it will have them, and we’ll be honest about it. The test is whether the data does a job for the person who gave it, or whether we’re taking it because we can and because it has value to us. We will always be the former, never the latter.
We’re honest about our products, including their limits.
We welcome sceptics. We may not be open source, but we’re happy to be an open book. We stand behind what we claim. We’re not trying to make people trust us. We’re trying to be trustworthy.
Human judgement is the product. Machines make it affordable.
The quality comes from a person making each choice. AI is why directories of this depth can now be built at a price that doesn’t require overcharging. But this wasn’t vibe-coded in a day. It took hundreds of human hours, and we’re happy to explain every design decision.
The money can’t damage the thing it pays for.
In a tiered product, those paying more will demand things that make the experience worse for everyone else. There are no tiers here. Everyone’s money buys the same thing. No one loses.
What this means
in practice.
You’ve heard the values, now here’s what we actually do.
No sponsored or featured listings
Money can’t buy position. Buyers aren’t looking for the providers who paid the most, they’re looking for the providers who offer what they want.
Listings shuffled daily, so nobody holds the top
Today the first position goes to a billion-pound multinational, tomorrow it’s a two-person operation offering the same quality on a smaller scale. They both paid the same, they both rank the same.
Flat subscription, no commission, no charge per lead
We’re selling visibility, not leads. Providers pay to be in the directory and get the visibility that brings. If it’s leads you’re after, there are plenty of services out there.
Enquiries go direct to the provider, never sold or shared
Bullying your way to the top of the search results and then selling one enquiry to five competitors is a brutal way of cashing in on desperation. It’s not what you want, and it’s not what we want.
No reviews and no ratings
When it comes to business reviews, people cheat. We all know it, and there’s very little anyone can do to stop it. We can’t police it, so we don’t offer it.
Contact details withheld from the API and structured data
Nobody can reliably tell the difference between an agent shortlisting for an L&D manager and a bot harvesting data. So contact details are hidden from both.
Anonymous browsing, no account needed to look
Buyers want to choose for themselves. Of course they want to hear the pitch, that’s part of buying. But they don’t want to be tagged, followed and chased. So we don’t give anyone the opportunity.
We count visits and report the numbers
We’re in the business of visibility, so we publish the numbers. How many people visit the site and view listings is our proof that this works.
Providers only. No marketplaces or resellers
Every listing is a business that actually delivers the service. No one selling someone else’s services is listed here.
This isn’t a movement. There’s nothing to join.
It’s just the thinking behind what I’m doing.
I've spent 25 years working in digital marketing, branded content, web design and SEO, and most recently teaching AI and SEO to businesses. I have been coding for years but, until recently, building a large database and complex UI was too time consuming for me to tackle with a small team. Now it's possible, so I'm creating the tools I've wanted for decades.
The photographs you see on this site were taken by me using a 4x5 camera, shot on photographic paper and developed using a black and white paper reversal technique which I have honed over many years. There are much easier ways to get photos on a website, but the easy way is not always the right way.
Get in touch: hello@theyardsproject.com
