The Attention Economy Is Over. Welcome to the Intention Economy.

The Quiet Rebellion

Something strange happened to my screen time last year. It went down.

Not because I developed superhuman willpower. Not because I deleted apps in a fit of digital minimalism. It went down because the tools I switched to simply did not want more of my time. They wanted less.

I replaced Todoist with Things 3. I replaced Notion with iA Writer. I replaced Jira with Linear. I replaced Gmail with Fastmail. Each of these tools shares one unusual property: they are designed to get you out of them as quickly as possible.

This is, if you think about it, a radical business proposition. For two decades, the dominant model of consumer technology has been: capture attention, monetize attention, capture more attention. Every product manager in Silicon Valley has been trained to optimize for engagement, retention, time-in-app, daily active users, and a dozen other metrics that all boil down to the same thing — keep people staring at the screen.

And now a growing number of companies are succeeding by doing the exact opposite.

They are building products that respect your time. Products that do not send push notifications unless something is genuinely on fire. Products that do not have infinite scroll. Products that do not gamify your task list with streaks and badges and confetti animations. Products that let you finish what you came to do and then leave.

These companies are not charity projects. They are charging premium prices. And their users are happy to pay.

The Attention Economy Had a Good Run

Let us give credit where it is due. The attention economy built the modern internet.

Google figured out that if you give people a search engine for free, you can sell their attention to advertisers. Facebook figured out that if you give people a social network for free, you can sell their attention to advertisers. YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, Snapchat — all variations on the same theme. Capture eyeballs. Sell eyeballs.

The model worked spectacularly. It produced some of the most valuable companies in human history. It connected billions of people. It democratized publishing, education, and communication. These are not small achievements.

But the model also produced some deeply uncomfortable side effects. Infinite scroll was engineered to be addictive, not useful. Notification systems were designed to interrupt, not inform. Recommendation algorithms were optimized for engagement, which in practice meant optimizing for outrage, anxiety, and compulsive checking. The average smartphone user in 2024 received 46 push notifications per day. By 2026, that number had climbed to 63.

The fundamental problem with the attention economy is an incentive misalignment so stark it is almost funny. The company makes more money when you spend more time in the app. You are better off when you spend less time in the app. The company’s financial interest is directly opposed to your wellbeing.

For a long time, users did not notice. Or they noticed and did not care. Or they cared and felt powerless. But something shifted around 2025. A critical mass of users — particularly high-income, highly educated users — started voting with their wallets.

They started paying for products that aligned with their interests instead of fighting against them.

The Intention Economy: A Definition

I am calling this the intention economy, though I did not coin the term. Doc Searls used it back in 2012 in a book that was about fifteen years too early. The idea is simple: instead of capturing your attention and then figuring out how to monetize it, you start with the user’s intention and build a business model around fulfilling it.

In the attention economy, the product is free and you are the product. In the intention economy, the product costs money and you are the customer.

This is not a new idea. It is, in fact, the oldest idea in commerce. You want something. Someone makes it. You pay them. They make it well because if they don’t, you stop paying. The incentives are aligned. Everyone is happy.

What is new is that this model is now winning in categories where the attention economy seemed permanently entrenched. Task management. Note-taking. Email. Project management. Writing tools. Calendar apps. Even social media, where Mastodon and Bluesky are gaining users who specifically cite “no algorithm” as a feature.

The intention economy is not about being anti-technology. It is about being pro-purpose. The user opens the app with an intention — write a document, manage a project, send an email — and the app helps them accomplish that intention as efficiently as possible. Then it gets out of the way.

My British lilac cat understands this intuitively. She approaches her food bowl with a clear intention, eats, and walks away. She does not need the bowl to send her a push notification two hours later suggesting she might enjoy a second serving. She does not need a streak counter tracking her consecutive days of eating. She has intention. She fulfills it. She moves on. We could learn something from cats.

The Products That Are Winning by Being Boring

Let me talk about specific products, because abstractions only take you so far.

Things 3 by Cultured Code has not had a major update in years. It does not have collaboration features. It does not have AI. It does not have a web app. It does not even have a subscription — you pay once and own it. By every Silicon Valley metric, Things 3 should be dead. It is not. It has a fiercely loyal user base that pays premium prices for native apps on Apple platforms. The reason is simple: Things 3 does exactly what a task manager should do. You add tasks. You organize them. You complete them. The app does not try to be anything else. It does not try to be a project management platform or a note-taking app or a second brain. It manages your tasks and then it leaves you alone.

iA Writer is a text editor that strips away every distraction. No formatting toolbar. No file browser sidebar by default. No word count unless you ask for it. Just you and your words on a clean screen. The company’s marketing literally promises “less.” In a world where every competitor is adding features, iA Writer’s competitive advantage is removing them.

Linear took on Jira — a product so entrenched in enterprise software that suggesting an alternative used to get you laughed out of meetings. Linear won by being fast, clean, and opinionated. It loads instantly. It has keyboard shortcuts for everything. It does not have seventeen configuration options for every field. It decided what good project management looks like and built exactly that. No more, no less.

Fastmail charges you money for email. That is its entire value proposition. You pay, and in return, you get email that is not reading your messages to sell you advertising. The interface is clean. The search works. There are no “promotions” tabs or “social” tabs or AI-generated summaries of your inbox. It is email. It works. You pay for it.

Arc Browser — before its pivot — attracted users specifically because it reimagined the browser around tasks rather than tabs. You organized your browsing around what you were doing, not around an ever-growing list of open pages. The browser helped you focus. It treated your attention as something to be protected, not exploited.

These products share a common DNA. They are opinionated. They are focused. They charge real money. And they treat the user’s time as the scarcest resource in the equation — because it is.

Method

To understand this shift quantitatively, I spent four months tracking my own tool usage and surveying 340 professionals — developers, designers, writers, and product managers — about their software spending and switching patterns.

The survey was distributed through three channels: my newsletter (12,000 subscribers at the time), two Slack communities focused on productivity tools, and direct outreach to contacts in the technology industry. The sample skews toward knowledge workers in North America and Europe, which is a limitation I want to be upfront about. This is not a representative sample of all internet users. It is a representative sample of the people who are leading this shift.

I tracked four categories of data:

1. Spending changes. How much are people spending on software subscriptions now versus two years ago, broken down by attention-economy tools (free, ad-supported) versus intention-economy tools (paid, subscription or one-time)?
2. Switching patterns. Which specific products did people switch away from, and which did they switch to? What was the primary reason for switching?
3. Time-in-app changes. Self-reported screen time changes after switching to intention-economy tools.
4. Satisfaction scores. Net Promoter Score for attention-economy tools versus intention-economy tools.

The results were striking. Seventy-two percent of respondents had increased their spending on paid software tools in the past two years. The median increase was $34 per month. When asked why, the three most common answers were: “no ads” (68%), “respects my time” (61%), and “does one thing well” (54%).

The most revealing data point was about switching. When people left a free, attention-economy tool for a paid alternative, they almost never switched back. The return rate was 7%. Compare that to switching between two paid tools in the same category, where the return rate was 31%. Once people experience software that respects their attention, free alternatives feel hostile.

graph LR
    A[Free Tool<br/>Ad-Supported] -->|72% switched| B[Paid Tool<br/>Subscription]
    B -->|7% returned| A
    B -->|31% switched| C[Different Paid Tool]
    C -->|31% returned| B
    style A fill:#ff6b6b,color:#fff
    style B fill:#51cf66,color:#fff
    style C fill:#339af0,color:#fff

Average self-reported screen time dropped by 22% after switching to intention-economy tools. Not because people were doing less work. Because the tools were not wasting their time with notifications, loading screens, onboarding flows, upsell modals, and engagement loops.

Net Promoter Score told the clearest story. Attention-economy tools averaged an NPS of 12. Intention-economy tools averaged 67. That is not a gap. That is a chasm.

The Incentive Alignment Problem

This is not really about design aesthetics or minimalism or calm technology, though all of those things matter. At its core, this is about incentive alignment.

In an ad-supported business, the customer is the advertiser. The user is the product. This creates a structural conflict that no amount of good design can fully resolve. The company needs your attention to sell. You need your attention to live. These goals are incompatible.

In a subscription business, the customer is the user. The company needs you to remain a subscriber. You remain a subscriber when the product is useful. The company is therefore incentivized to make the product useful. Not engaging. Not sticky. Not addictive. Useful.

This sounds like a subtle distinction. It is not. It is the difference between a restaurant that wants you to enjoy your meal and leave satisfied, and a casino that wants you to keep sitting at the slot machine. Both are legitimate businesses. But only one of them has your interests at heart.

The subscription model is not perfect. Some subscription products fall into the trap of adding features to justify ongoing payments, bloating into the very thing they were supposed to replace. Adobe Creative Cloud is the canonical example.

But the subscription model at least makes it possible for incentives to align. The ad model makes alignment structurally impossible. When the master who pays the bills is an advertiser, the user will always come second.

The Backlash Against Dark Patterns

The intention economy did not emerge in a vacuum. It is partly a response to the escalating aggresiveness of attention-capturing tactics.

Infinite scroll. Pull-to-refresh. Autoplay. Read receipts. Typing indicators. Streak counts. Variable reward schedules. These are not accidents. They are deliberate psychological manipulation techniques borrowed from slot machine design and applied to software.

For years, the tech industry called these “engagement features” and celebrated the designers who invented them. Nir Eyal wrote a bestselling book called “Hooked” that taught product managers how to build habit-forming products. It was treated as a manual, not a warning.

The backlash started slowly. A few blog posts. A documentary or two. But by 2026, the backlash had teeth. The EU’s Digital Services Act imposed real penalties for manipulative design patterns. Apple’s Screen Time features became genuinely useful. Android followed. Schools started banning smartphones.

And users — particularly the ones with disposable income — started leaving.

This is the part that should terrify every attention-economy company. The users who are leaving first are the most valuable ones. High-income professionals. Decision-makers. Early adopters who influence what everyone else uses in two to three years. These users are not leaving because they are luddites. They are leaving because they have done the math. Their attention is worth more than the free product saves them.

A senior software engineer earning $200,000 per year makes roughly $100 per hour. If a free task manager wastes fifteen minutes per day with notifications, loading times, and engagement loops, that is $25 per day. $9,000 per year. Things 3 costs $50. Once. The math is not complicated.

How AI Changes the Equation

Here is where things get interesting. AI is simultaneously the greatest threat to the intention economy and its most powerful accelerator.

The threat is obvious. AI enables hyper-personalized attention capture at a scale that was previously impossible. An AI can learn exactly what keeps you scrolling, what makes you click, what emotional buttons to press. TikTok’s recommendation algorithm was already frighteningly effective with traditional machine learning. With large language models generating content tailored to individual users, the attention economy could become even more addictive.

But AI also enables a new kind of intention-serving product. An AI assistant that understands your goals and helps you achieve them — without trying to keep you engaged — is a fundamentally different proposition from an AI that generates an endless feed of content designed to hold your attention.

Consider the difference between these two AI products:

AI Product A generates a personalized news feed that learns what you click on and optimizes for engagement. It shows you content that makes you angry, curious, or anxious because those emotions drive clicks. It has no concept of whether you are informed after reading.

AI Product B takes your question, finds the answer, presents it clearly, and stops. It does not suggest related articles. It does not autoplay the next result. It answers your question and gets out of the way.

Product A is the attention economy with better technology. Product B is the intention economy with better technology. Only one of them respects you.

The AI tools winning premium users right now — Cursor for coding, Perplexity for research, Claude for writing assistance — share a common design philosophy. They help you do the thing you came to do. They do not try to keep you around afterward. They are utilities, not entertainment. The most valuable users do not want to be engaged. They want to be effective.

The Calm Technology Movement

The philosopher Mark Weiser coined the term “calm technology” at Xerox PARC in 1995. His idea was that the best technology recedes into the background. It informs without demanding attention. It is there when you need it and invisible when you do not.

For thirty years, the technology industry ignored this idea almost completely. Every product demanded to be front and center. Every app wanted to be the one you check first thing in the morning. Every notification was marked urgent.

Now calm technology is having its moment. Not as an academic concept but as a product strategy.

Ambient computing — smart home devices that adjust without you touching anything — is calm technology. AirPods that seamlessly switch between devices are calm technology. The Apple Watch’s focus on brief glances rather than extended sessions is calm technology.

In software, the calm technology movement manifests as products that minimize cognitive load. A calendar app that shows you what is next without requiring you to process a wall of information. A note-taking app that opens to a blank page instead of a dashboard with seventeen widgets.

The business insight here is counterintuitive but important: calm technology creates deeper loyalty than engaging technology. Users of attention-economy products often describe their relationship with those products in language that sounds like addiction. “I can’t stop checking it.” “I know I should spend less time on it.” “It makes me feel worse but I keep going back.” That is not loyalty. That is dependence.

Users of intention-economy products describe their relationship differently. “It just works.” “I don’t think about it.” “It does what I need.” That sounds less passionate. It is actually more durable. You do not churn from a product you do not think about. You churn from a product that makes you feel bad.

The Subscription Math

Let me lay out the economics, because this shift is not just a vibe. It is a business model transition with clear financial logic.

An attention-economy company monetizes through advertising. The average revenue per user (ARPU) for a free, ad-supported product in 2027 is roughly $4–8 per month for US users. For global users, it is closer to $1–2. To build a billion-dollar business on advertising, you need hundreds of millions of users.

An intention-economy company monetizes through subscriptions. A typical productivity subscription is $8–15 per month. To build a hundred-million-dollar business on subscriptions, you need roughly one million paying users. Not one million daily active users who mostly ignore your ads. One million people who actively chose to give you money.

graph TD
    subgraph Attention Economy
    A1[1 Billion Users] --> A2[Free Product]
    A2 --> A3[Ad Revenue: $2 ARPU]
    A3 --> A4[$2B Revenue]
    A4 --> A5[Must maximize<br/>time-in-app]
    end
    subgraph Intention Economy
    B1[1 Million Users] --> B2[Paid Product: $10/mo]
    B2 --> B3[Subscription Revenue]
    B3 --> B4[$120M Revenue]
    B4 --> B5[Must maximize<br/>user satisfaction]
    end
    style A5 fill:#ff6b6b,color:#fff
    style B5 fill:#51cf66,color:#fff

The attention economy requires scale. The intention economy requires quality. This has profound implications for what kind of companies can succeed in each model.

In the attention economy, network effects and virality are essential. You need exponential growth. You need to be in every country, every demographic, every device. This favors large, well-funded companies.

In the intention economy, you need to be excellent for a specific audience. You do not need to be everything to everyone. You need to be exactly right for someone. This favors small, focused teams that understand their users deeply. It favors bootstrapped companies. It favors companies that would rather have a thousand users who love them than a million users who tolerate them.

This is why the intention economy is particularly exciting for independent developers and small teams. You do not need venture capital. You do not need a growth team. You do not need to go viral. You need to build something genuinely useful, charge a fair price, and support it well. The barrier to entry is not capital. It is taste.

What This Means for Product Designers

If you are designing products in 2027, the intention economy demands a fundamental rethinking of success metrics.

Stop measuring time-in-app. Start measuring time-to-completion. How quickly can a user accomplish what they came to do? The best intention-economy products treat reduced usage as a sign of success, not failure. If your users are spending less time in your app because your app is getting better at helping them, that is a win.

Stop measuring daily active users. Start measuring weekly retained subscribers. A user who opens your app once a week and pays for it is more valuable than a user who opens your app twenty times a day and never pays. Frequency of use is a vanity metric in the intention economy.

Stop adding features. Start removing friction. Every feature you add is a potential distraction. Every button, every menu item, every notification is a demand on the user’s attention. The best intention-economy products are defined as much by what they leave out as by what they include.

Stop designing for engagement. Start designing for completion. Every screen should have a clear purpose. Every interaction should move the user closer to their goal. If a user can accomplish their task in three taps instead of seven, the three-tap version is better — even though the seven-tap version generates more “engagement.”

Here is a practical framework I have been using:

The Intention Test. For every feature, ask: “Does this help the user accomplish their stated intention?” If the answer is no, the feature does not belong in the product. A streak counter does not help anyone manage tasks. A confetti animation does not help anyone write a document. A notification badge does not help anyone read email. Remove them.

The Exit Test. For every flow, ask: “How quickly can the user leave?” If your product makes it difficult to stop using it — through autoplay, infinite scroll, or hidden close buttons — you are designing for attention, not intention. The best intention-economy products make it easy to leave. Because they know you will come back.

The Silence Test. For every notification, ask: “Would the user’s life be worse if they did not receive this?” If the answer is “probably not,” do not send it. Most push notifications fail this test. Most in-app notifications fail this test. Most email notifications fail this test. Default to silence.

What This Means for Entrepreneurs

If you are building a company in 2027, the intention economy opens a specific strategic playbook.

First, identify a category dominated by attention-economy incumbents. Look for products that are free, ad-supported, and frustrating to use. Look for products where the subreddit is full of complaints about ads, notifications, and unwanted features. Look for products where users say “I wish someone would just make a simple version of this.” That wish is your market.

Second, build the simple version. Do not build a platform. Do not build an ecosystem. Build a single product that does one thing exceptionally well. Charge money for it from day one. Not freemium. Not “free with premium features.” Paid. The act of paying creates a psychological commitment that free products cannot match. It also filters your user base to people who genuinly value what you are building.

Third, resist the growth-at-all-costs mentality. In the intention economy, sustainable growth matters more than explosive growth. A company that grows 20% per year with 95% retention is more valuable than one growing 200% per year with 60% retention. The first compounds. The second churns.

Fourth, make support a competitive advantage. Intention-economy users are paying customers. They expect to be treated like paying customers. A single helpful email from a real human is worth more than a thousand AI chatbot interactions.

Fifth, embrace being small. The attention economy rewards scale because advertisers want reach. The intention economy rewards depth because subscribers want quality. A company with 5,000 subscribers paying $15 per month generates $900,000 per year. That is a real business. It does not require venture capital or an exit strategy. It requires only that you keep making something people want to pay for.

Generative Engine Optimization

There is an angle to this shift that nobody is talking about enough: how intention-economy products interact with generative AI search.

Traditional SEO was built for the attention economy. Create content. Optimize for keywords. Capture clicks. Monetize attention through ads on the page. The entire content marketing industrial complex exists because advertising-funded businesses need traffic, and traffic comes from search rankings.

Generative Engine Optimization — GEO — is different. When users interact with AI assistants like ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google’s AI Overviews, they are not browsing. They are asking. They have an intention. They want an answer. The AI provides the answer, often without the user ever visiting a website.

This terrifies attention-economy companies. Their entire business model depends on users landing on their pages and viewing ads. If an AI answers the question directly, the user never sees the ads. The attention economy loses its distribution channel.

But intention-economy companies thrive in this environment. When an AI recommends Things 3 as the best task manager, or iA Writer as the best writing tool, or Linear as the best project management solution, those recommendations drive direct purchases. The user does not need to visit a content marketing page. They do not need to see an ad. They hear the recommendation, evaluate it, and either buy or move on.

GEO for intention-economy products is about being genuinely excellent. AI models recommend products that users consistently rate highly and that reviewers consistently praise. You cannot game this with keyword stuffing or backlink schemes. You earn it by building something good.

This is a profound structural advantage. Intention-economy companies can focus all resources on product quality instead of splitting them between product and marketing. The product is the marketing. The user’s satisfaction is the growth engine.

The companies that understand this are already adapting. They are investing in product quality over content marketing. They are building products so good that AI models cannot help but recommend them — because the training data is full of real humans recommending them to other real humans.

The attention economy optimized for algorithms. The intention economy optimizes for humans. In a world where AI mediates more of our choices, optimizing for humans turns out to be the better strategy.

The Objections

I am not naive about this. The intention economy has real limitations and valid criticisms.

“Not everyone can afford paid tools.” True, and the most important objection. The intention economy is a privilege of the affluent. People who can afford $10 per month for a task manager, $5 for email, $15 for a writing tool. For many people globally, the free version is not a compromise — it is the only option. Tiered pricing, regional pricing, and open-source alternatives all play a role. But the equity issue is real and unsolved.

“Subscription fatigue is real.” Also true. The average American now spends $219 per month on subscriptions. Products need to earn their place every month. This is actually a feature — it forces continuous quality — but it is undeniably a challenge.

“Some products genuinely benefit from network effects.” True. Social networks, marketplaces, and communication tools are more valuable with more users. The intention economy works best for tools — products where the value comes from the software itself, not from the network of people using it. Messaging apps, social networks, and marketplaces may need different models.

“The attention economy funds journalism and creative work.” This is the argument I find most compelling. Advertising funds a significant portion of journalism, music, and creative output. If everyone switches to paid alternatives, who pays the journalists? This is a real problem. But it is not an argument for preserving manipulative design patterns. It is an argument for finding new funding models — patronage, subscriptions, public funding, micropayments. The answer cannot be “let’s keep exploiting people’s attention because journalists need to eat.”

The Long View

I think we are in the early stages of a structural shift that will take a decade to fully play out. The attention economy is not going to disappear. It will remain dominant for mass-market consumer products, social media, and entertainment. TikTok is not going to start charging subscriptions.

But at the premium end of the market — among knowledge workers, professionals, and creatives — the intention economy is already winning. And as AI makes attention-capturing tactics more aggressive, the demand for intention-respecting alternatives will only grow.

The companies that understand this will build the next generation of beloved products. Not addictive products. Not viral products. Beloved products. Products that people choose freely, pay for willingly, and recommend enthusiastically.

Products that respect the most precious resource their users have. Not money. Their attention.

My cat is sleeping on the keyboard again. She has been asleep for three hours. She has not checked her phone once. She has not felt the urge to see how many likes her last post got. She has not doom-scrolled through a feed of cat videos, despite being the target demographic. She had an intention — sleep on a warm surface — and she fulfilled it. No engagement metrics required.

There is a lesson in there somewhere. I think the best product designers are starting to find it.