Tree Exchange App

In early September, we made a radical change to our working week at Steadfast Collective.

We started The Friday Collective, an initiative for all team members to make Fridays a time for learning, teaching and exploring new ideas.

André (our Technical Lead) got to work on a new project idea; TreeExchange.app, a micro-app encouraging companies to think green and to plant trees. 

But how many trees? And what could be the basis for planting them?

Each month, as a studio, we spend a large amount of money on server costs to keep our websites and web apps running.

So we wondered what it would look like to spend a proportionate amount of money on something that would keep the planet up and running.

As a studio, we rely on Digital Ocean to host our websites and applications online and know that thousands of other companies and organisations use Digital Ocean for their hosting. We decided to utilise the amazing Digital Ocean API to convert the size and number of Digital Ocean Droplets (servers) people have into planted trees.

We had a feeling we wouldn’t be the only ones interested in this.

How does Tree Exchange work?

Log in securely with your Digital Ocean credentials and, using the Digital Ocean API, we pull a count of your Droplets and their sizes. 

We then use some magic (basic math really), to calculate how many trees we believe you should exchange for your usage.

For example, for a droplet up to $40 we add 20 trees. For a droplet that costs more than $40 and up to $80 we will add 30 trees, and so on. At this point, you are able to increase (or decrease) your monthly tree commitment, add your payment details and hit save. 

Automagically (see what we did there?!), each month, we will send an API call to Ecologi to plant the agreed number of trees into our new Tree Exchange forest – https://ecologi.com/treeexchange. 

Each person signed up will then receive an email celebrating the total of numbers of trees you have planted, so that you can give yourself a high five.

Why did we choose Ecologi for the tree planting? Read our previous post about why we believe in the work Ecologi is undertaking.

You can give our Tree Exchange app a go over at https://treeexchange.app/