Leaving should be easy

I want to make a promise that is easy to test: leaving connect0 should be easy. Not "we believe in open standards." Not "your data is yours." Those are sentences. A promise about openness is only worth something if the person hearing it can check it without asking us — and the person hearing it, increasingly, is not a person. It is an agent, and agents do not read About pages. They fetch URLs.

Two kinds of open

There is assertable openness and there is verifiable openness, and the web is full of the first kind.

Assertable openness is a paragraph. It says a platform is standards-based, portable, integration-friendly. It is written by marketing, reviewed by legal, and it is unfalsifiable in the precise sense that nothing on the page lets you find out whether it is true. You would have to sign up, build something, and then try to leave.

Verifiable openness is a command. curl this URL, get that document. If the document comes back, the claim was true; if it 403s, it was not. The claim and the proof are the same artefact, so it cannot drift. There is no version of the page where the paragraph stays and the surface quietly goes away.

We were reminded of the difference while reading a competitor's openness manifesto a few days ago. It was well written — I agreed with most of it. Then we asked their site for the same page from a script instead of a browser, and got a 403. Not a rate limit; a wall. The essay about openness could only be read by a human on a laptop. I do not think anyone there intended that. That is the point: nobody has to intend it. Assertable openness rots by default, because nothing is checking.

What we publish instead

Everything below is live today. Run any of it; none of it needs an account.

Every public page on connect0.ai answers Accept: text/markdown with the page as markdown — the pricing page included, which means the rate table your agents are billed at is a curl away:

curl -H 'Accept: text/markdown' https://connect0.ai/pricing

The manual an agent needs to set itself up is a public file:

curl -L https://connect0.ai/skill.md

The MCP server describes itself, tools and all, on a well-known path; the REST API publishes its OpenAPI document and an RFC 9727 catalog; the ARD manifest ties them together for registries:

curl https://mcp.connect0.ai/.well-known/mcp/server-card.json
curl https://api.connect0.ai/openapi.json
curl https://connect0.ai/.well-known/ai-catalog.json

And there is a page that lists all of it, with a command per row and what each one returns: connect0.ai/open. That page answers Accept: text/markdown too — the list of proofs is itself a proof.

Why this is the product, not a feature

The buyer of an AI workforce is going to verify claims mechanically whether we like it or not. Their agents will read our price list, our tool list, and our manual, and they will do it by fetching, not by trusting. A platform that hides its surfaces from non-browser clients is, to that buyer, closed — regardless of what the About page says.

So we hold ourselves to a rule: one runnable proof on every marketing surface. The home page has the one-prompt setup. The Controls page has the machine-readable price list. The pricing page has the published rate for every action. The footer has /open. If we cannot point at a command, we do not make the claim.

The same rule is why leaving is easy. Your audit log exports. Your connections are yours to revoke from the dashboard. Every rate is published before it runs, so there is no surprise on the last invoice. Your ledger's postings carry their provenance, and the API that reads them is the same one that wrote them. None of this is a policy we could quietly change, because each one is a surface you can fetch.

The ask

If you evaluate platforms for agents, add one line to your checklist: ask for the page from a script. If it comes back, keep reading. If it does not, you have learned the most important thing about the platform, and it took one command.

We will keep connect0.ai/open current. If something on it stops answering, that is a bug, and we would like to hear about it: hi@connect0.ai.