Ecosia plants trees when you search. What about when you wake up?
How Ecosia's tree-planting search engine and browser inspired SproutAwake, and why the alarm clock turned out to be the perfect everyday app to give an eco-friendly alternative.
Every time someone searches with Ecosia, a little bit of the internet turns into trees.
If you haven’t come across it, Ecosia is a search engine (and now a web browser) that puts its profits into planting trees and other climate projects. You search the way you always would, and the money that would usually go to shareholders goes into the ground instead. This year they passed 250 million trees, and they only count the ones that have survived more than three years.
What struck me about Ecosia wasn’t really the trees, though. It was how little it asked of anyone.
Nobody had to change anything
Most environmental advice asks you to do something different. Drive less, buy less, remember your bags, feel a bit guilty when you don’t. All worthwhile, and all a little exhausting.
Ecosia doesn’t ask for any of that. You were going to search the internet today anyway. You’ll do it again tomorrow, and the day after. Ecosia just quietly swapped out the thing you were already doing for a version that happens to plant trees.
That idea stuck with me. And it led to a fairly simple question: what other apps do people use every single day that could work the same way?
Going through the home screen
Search was an obvious one, and Ecosia had already done it brilliantly. So I started thinking about the other apps people open without thinking. The ones that are part of the furniture.
A good candidate needed a few things. People had to use it every day. Not most days, every day, so the impact would add up. It had to be something people were already willing to pay for, so there’d be money to give away in the first place. And ideally, it would be a moment that felt like it could mean a bit more than it currently does.
The alarm clock ticked every box.
Why the alarm clock
Almost everyone sets one. It’s often the first app you touch in the morning, before your messages, before the news, before anything else. And people already pay for alarm apps, especially heavy sleepers, who’ll happily pay for anything that actually gets them out of bed.
There was something else, too. Waking up is a tiny daily act of willpower. It’s also, let’s be honest, one of the least loved moments of most people’s day. If you could attach something good to it, something bigger than yourself, it might make that moment feel a little different.
So that’s what SproutAwake is. An alarm clock for heavy sleepers, with loud alarms and wake-up missions to make sure you actually get up, and 50% of proceeds going to One Tree Planted, a reforestation nonprofit planting in over 80 countries.
Borrowing the right lessons
Ecosia taught me a few things I tried to hold on to while building it.
The app has to be good on its own. Nobody keeps using a search engine that gives bad results just because it plants trees. The same goes for alarms. SproutAwake has to wake you up reliably first, and plant trees second. So it’s built on Apple’s AlarmKit, rings through Silent mode and Focus, and makes you finish a mission before it goes quiet.
Be open about where the money goes. Ecosia publishes a lot about its projects and finances, and that openness is a big part of why people trust it. We share the number of trees planted every month on TikTok, so anyone can follow along.
Don’t make it about guilt. You shouldn’t need to feel bad about the planet to use it. You just need to want to get up in the morning. The trees are a nice side effect of something you were doing anyway.
Still small, still growing
To be clear, SproutAwake isn’t affiliated with Ecosia. I’m one developer who saw what they’d built and wondered what else could work that way. Ecosia has planted hundreds of millions of trees. We’re at the very beginning.
But that’s sort of the point. You don’t need to plant 250 million trees on day one. You just need people to keep doing something they were already going to do, and let it add up.
If you’re going to set an alarm tomorrow anyway, it might as well plant something.