The Vita Manifesto

We stand in an old tradition. John Stuart Mill and Henry Sidgwick argued that the right measure of a society is the wellbeing of the people in it. Whatever else people disagree about, almost every conception of a good life presupposes health: it is the capital from which everything else — work, love, learning, play — is drawn. Michael Grossman formalized this intuition in 1972: health is a capital stock that depreciates with age and grows with investment. Sleep, food, movement, and the knowledge to steer them are the investment inputs.

A society that makes those inputs cheaper gets more health, and through health, more of everything people value. That is the utilitarian case in one sentence.

We are careful with words here. Health itself is not, strictly, a public good — my treatment is not yours. But the tools of prevention sit at the intersection of three well-established market failures, each of which points the same way.

Positive externalities (Pigou). When one person stays healthy, others benefit: their family, their employer, their co-insured, the public purse that funds their care. Arthur Pigou showed a century ago that markets systematically under-provide goods whose benefits spill over to others, and that the remedy is to subsidize them — in the limiting case, down to a price of zero.

Merit goods (Musgrave). Prevention is the textbook merit good: something people under-invest in relative to their own later-life interests, because its costs are immediate and its benefits are distant and invisible. Societies already accept this logic for vaccination, seatbelts and schooling. Daily preventive habits belong on the same list.

Zero marginal cost (Samuelson). This is the argument specific to software, and the sharpest of the three. A digital health tool is non-rival: serving one more person costs effectively nothing. First-best pricing sets price equal to marginal cost. For Vita, the marginal cost of one more healthy user is a fraction of a cent of cloud infrastructure. The efficient price of digital prevention is therefore zero — every euro charged above that excludes someone whose benefit exceeded the true cost of serving them. Charging for it is not a business model; it is a deadweight loss.

None of this is radical. It is the ordinary application of public economics to a new kind of good.

The burden is chronic and behavioral. The World Health Organization attributes roughly three-quarters of deaths worldwide to noncommunicable diseases — cardiovascular disease, diabetes, cancers, chronic respiratory disease. Their principal modifiable drivers are exactly what a preventive tool addresses: diet, physical activity, weight, sleep, tobacco and alcohol. In the United States, the CDC estimates that people with chronic and mental health conditions account for about 90% of the nation's health expenditure.

Prevention pays. WHO's analyses of its “best buy” interventions against noncommunicable disease estimate a return of roughly seven dollars for every dollar invested, in longer, more productive lives.

Price is a barrier even when it is small. The RAND Health Insurance Experiment — still the most rigorous study of health cost-sharing ever run — found that even modest prices reduce the use of care, and that people cut back on effective care as much as ineffective care. Decades of adherence research since have confirmed the pattern: small copays measurably reduce whether people take prescribed medication. The gap between “almost free” and “free” is not almost zero; it is where a large share of the population quietly drops out. If prevention works only when it is used daily, then even a small price defeats its purpose.

One honest caveat. We do not claim that prevention lowers total health spending. The health-economics literature is genuinely mixed on that: people who live longer consume care for longer, and that is a good outcome, not a failure. Health spending is not waste to be minimized — it is care for human beings. Our claim is the defensible one: prevention buys enormous amounts of health and wellbeing per euro, and a zero price is the efficient and equitable way to deliver it.

• The core is free, forever. Every tracker — weight, fasting, food, activity, sleep, and the rest — with unlimited history. No paywall will ever stand between a person and their own health data.
• Your data is yours. Owner-isolated by architecture, exportable and erasable on demand, never sold, never used against you. AI processing of health data happens only with explicit consent.
• Costs stay near zero by design. Vita runs on serverless infrastructure with no standing costs, so the economics of the promise hold at any scale. Optional premium AI features, which carry real per-user marginal cost, may be paid — consistent with the same principle: price at marginal cost.
• The paid tier is temporary by design. It exists solely to cover those real AI costs, and we commit to retiring it the moment sponsorship covers them. The end state we are working toward is a Vita with no price anywhere — for anyone. Sponsors do not fund a business model; they remove the last price barrier.
• No dark patterns. No engagement farming, no streak-shaming, no manufactured anxiety. The product succeeds when you are healthier, not when you are captive.

The United Nations already recognizes a category for this: digital public goods — open, privacy-respecting digital tools that serve the public interest, with health platforms like DHIS2 as precedents. We believe everyday preventive health tools belong in that category, funded the way we fund lighthouses, weather forecasts and public libraries: collectively, because everyone benefits and exclusion is senseless.

So this is our invitation. To cloud providers: the marginal cost of hosting prevention for a nation is, for you, a rounding error — sponsor it, and the last paid feature disappears with it. To governments and public health agencies: you already subsidize treatment at enormous cost; subsidizing the infrastructure of prevention is the cheapest health intervention you will ever fund. To economists and researchers: hold us to the standard this page sets — correct us where the evidence moves.

Human beings should not have to pay to be healthy. The economics agrees. Now it is a matter of building it — which is what Vita is.

• J.S. Mill, Utilitarianism (1863).
• H. Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics (1874).
• A.C. Pigou, The Economics of Welfare (1920) — externalities and corrective subsidies.
• P. Samuelson, “The Pure Theory of Public Expenditure”, Review of Economics and Statistics (1954).
• R. Musgrave, The Theory of Public Finance (1959) — merit goods.
• M. Grossman, “On the Concept of Health Capital and the Demand for Health”, Journal of Political Economy (1972).
• World Health Organization — Noncommunicable diseases fact sheet.
• World Health Organization — Saving lives, spending less: the global investment case for noncommunicable diseases.
• US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — chronic disease facts and health-expenditure data.
• J.P. Newhouse et al., Free for All? Lessons from the RAND Health Insurance Experiment (1993) — RAND HIE project overview.
• P. van Baal et al., “Lifetime Medical Costs of Obesity”, PLoS Medicine (2008) — why we do not overclaim on spending.
• Digital Public Goods Alliance — digitalpublicgoods.net.