SOMOS is a social enterprise by design.

The aim is to build practices into every part of the business that support both grassroots organisations and workers doing social justice work.

This includes our business model i.e. how we earn money and where that money goes.

In today’s post, I’m going to break down how our pricing works and why it’s structured the way it is.

But first, let’s briefly look at where SOMOS sits in the wider landscape (and how our approach differs from the other ways freelancers and fractional professionals usually find work).

How Freelancers and Fractional Professionals Typically Find Work 🤔

There are three common routes for building a fractional or freelance career:

→ via recruiters
→ via marketplaces
→ going solo

The first two charge hefty commissions because they handle the part most people really hate… finding clients.

The problem?

Those commissions often stack up to 20–40% of earnings, indefinitely.

And because the platform/recruiter “owns” the commercial relationship, the worker never really builds long-term independence.

Going solo can give you freedom but also all the admin, marketing and responsibility for client acquisition that comes with it 🙈.

SOMOS exists to make the “going solo” route easier and smoother.

Our job is to give people the tools to market their services, operate more confidently and attract work that genuinely aligns with their values.

Commissions vs Monthly Fees 🤷🏾‍♂️

As we aren’t a “connector” like a recruiter or marketplace, we don’t charge commissions.

We’re instead structured like a software business:

→ one simple monthly subscription fee
→ no take-rate/commission

Along with being significantly cheaper for people, this approach is more sustainable in the long-term because our customers own their commercial relationships, not us.

How SOMOS Pricing Works and Why 🙌🏾

Alongside wanting to offer the best-value deal for our customers, our pricing is designed to benefit our wider ecosystem.

For every SOMOS subscription:

• £5 goes to our Impact Fund, which supports long-term capacity building for community partners.

• Another £5 goes directly to a grassroots project chosen by the customer, giving each subscriber a small but meaningful way to redistribute resources every month.

Given our current pricing is only £35/month, this donation element is a significant commitment.

Hopefully(!), it helps turn each subscription into a direct vehicle for strengthening communities and movements at a time when they really need it.

How Each Donation Component Works 🌍

The SOMOS Impact Fund 🟢

SOMOS has a unique co-ownership model.

From day one, we set aside a significant percentage of our equity to be shared with grassroots organisations, our advisors, team and eventually our customers too!

The Impact Fund is the part of our model created specifically for our community co-owners: the grassroots projects who receive gifted equity shares in SOMOS.

How it works

Each community co-owner is gifted 500 shares in SOMOS, with the exact same financial and voting rights as any other shareholder.

That means they:

→ receive dividends when SOMOS distributes profits
→ hold voting power in key decisions
→ receive a payout if SOMOS is ever sold

How the fund is financed

→ £5 from every monthly subscription goes directly into our Impact Fund, for the benefit of community co-owners.
→ In addition, SOMOS donates 1% of all additional revenue into the same fund, which is then shared equally among our core partners 😄

The funding we provide is unrestricted, giving partners the freedom to allocate donations where they’re most needed — from wages and capacity building to urgent programme costs or community support.

Our first core community partner: Conversation Over Borders 💛

As it stands, we have one community co-owner, Conversation Over Borders (COB).

I’ll follow up with a more detailed overview of their work, but it’s worth highlighting that despite a horrendous tide of racist, anti-migrant rhetoric in the UK — COB continues to provide thoughtful, cross-cultural support for refugees and asylum seekers.

Their growing community offers:

→ free English classes
→ mental health support
→ digital skills training
→ powerful advocacy and storytelling work

If you’d like to help them continue this essential work, you can do so here.

Projects We Love ❤️

Alongside the Impact Fund, every subscriber also directs £5/month to a grassroots organisation of their choice.

The idea is simple: if you’re building a mission-driven independent career, you should also have a say in where some of your subscription fee goes.

It’s a small but meaningful way for each customer to support the movements and communities they care about most.

How it works

When a customer signs up to SOMOS, they can choose from a curated list of grassroots organisations — each doing powerful work across a range of social justice issues.

Here’s our current list of Projects We Love:

• BLAM 🏆
  Supporting the wellbeing of Black communities through mental health, education and cultural advocacy.

• BuildPalestine 🌱
  Strengthening the social innovation sector in Palestine by connecting values-led funders with impactful community initiatives.

• Conversation Over Borders 🤝
  Connecting refugees and asylum seekers with volunteers for English lessons, befriending, and confidence-building.

• foodfacts.org 🍏
  Providing credible, science-backed information to help people make informed choices about food and nutrition.

• Global Voices 🕊️
  A multilingual community of journalists and human rights advocates amplifying underrepresented stories worldwide.

• LAWA 🌍
  The UK’s only refuges run by and for Latin American women and children fleeing gender-based violence.

• Level Up 🔥
  A feminist community campaigning for gender justice and liberation from systemic and bodily violence.

• Linguistic Justice Foundation ✊🏽
  Advancing expert-driven, impactful interventions that promote linguistic justice globally.

• Médecins Sans Frontières 🚑
  Delivering urgent medical and humanitarian support to save lives in more than 70 countries.

• People & Planet 🌍
  A student-led movement organising campaigns against oppression, injustice, and environmental harm.

• Respond Crisis Translation 💬
  Trauma-informed, around-the-clock interpretation for migrants and refugees when language is a barrier to dignity and safety.

• Tech For Palestine 🇵🇸
  A coalition of founders, engineers, and advocates supporting Palestinian liberation and digital rights.

Over time, this list will grow.

We’ll invite suggestions from subscribers and use this pool of organisations to guide future Impact Fund beneficiaries too.

The goal is to let our community shape where resources flow — and to create a model where independent workers directly strengthen the movements they believe in. ✨

That’s it for now!

Thanks for being here 🙏🏽

Khawar | Founder @ SOMOS 👋🏽

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📬 Reach out on LinkedIn, I’d love to connect.
💚 Check out our Blog for tips on how to build a fractional career in social impact.

→ After a few years of living on the move, I’ll be settling in Kuala Lumpur 🇲🇾 for the foreseeable future.

→ I’ve got a 5 year visa and my folks will also be moving over in 2026 so big changes (and lots of admin 🙀) for everyone.

As much as I’ve enjoyed visiting everywhere, KL really feels like home and I’m excited about being in one place (with great food!) and focussing on the business.

Rebuilding SOMOS for freelancers & fractional leaders working in social impact 💚

Aside from big life changes(!), I’ve also been re-building SOMOS as the business pivots out of the online language teaching space into software designed to help freelancers and fractional leaders working in social impact manage their work day-to-day.

In case you missed it, I wrote a short post about why I made the shift here.

I’ll be taking a more build in public approach to SOMOS 2.0, starting with a look at some of the no-code tools I’m using to get an MVP up and running.

Core goals for the rebuild 🎯

Having spoken with a few potential users (and taking some lessons from the previous version!), I wanted to make sure of two things:

1️⃣ Inbound marketing was solid from day one: I’m looking to attract the right kind of users early without relying on paid ads or too much cold outreach.

2️⃣ The product could be flexible and fast to build: a simple, easily updated web app that can evolve as user feedback comes in.

Marketing Site, Helpful Directories + Blog 📣

The marketing website is the foundation for our inbound strategy: combining tailored landing pages, directories and a blog to attract the right audience over time.

I’ve built this using a no-code tool called Unicorn Platform - it’s quick to set up, easy to update and very well structured for SEO.

Core functionality built:

Each of these is designed to help support long-term SEO visibility and AI discoverability, while providing genuine value for potential SOMOS users.

✅ Landing pages:

• Explain what we do, the problem we solve & how the product works.

• There are several tailored versions for our different audiences — fractional workers, freelancers, social entrepreneurs, social impact leaders and DEI professionals.

✅ Blog:

• Designed to be a genuinely useful resource for fractional professionals.

• A mix of guides, insights and free tools (like our rate calculator for freelancers) to help people build flexible, values-led careers.

✅ SOMOS Selects:

• A growing directory of helpful communities, service providers and even city guides for nomadic or remote workers.

Not yet built:

🤷🏽‍♂️ Compare pages + listicles:

• Planned as future SEO assets — these typically rank well and will help SOMOS reach people earlier in their search journey.

You can also take a look at somos.work and let me know what you think so far - feedback always welcome!

Next up, let’s look at the other side of the build: how I’ve been using Zite, Airtable, Fillout, Zapier and Make to prototype the actual SOMOS web app. 🚀

Building the new SOMOS Web App 🙀

The first iteration of SOMOS (originally a platform for online language teachers) was built using no code tools like Softr (interface), Airtable (database), Heartbeat (community + teaching), Stripe (payments) and Tally (forms) alongside automation software (Make & Zapier) and HEAPS of custom code and “hacks” to pull together a comprehensive solution.

✅ It worked - we had paying customers who could create and sell different types of products directly through the platform.

✅ The Softr community was incredibly generous with sharing ideas, templates and creative workarounds to help build customisations where needed.

🤯 It was a NIGHTMARE to maintain. Softr has evolved a lot as a product over the last few years (mostly for the better) but each update came with a lot of manual fixes and time-consuming rebuilds.

🤯 For more complex products, Softr eventually gets quite limiting so for the new version of SOMOS, I wanted to explore other avenues.

Why I Chose Zite (vs. Softr) 🧩

Vibe-Coding

I’m sure by now, you’ve probably heard of (or even tried) “vibe-coding”.

If not, imagine you’re to trying to build a piece of wooden furniture:

→ Coding is like hiring a skilled carpenter: total freedom to design whatever you want, but it can get time-consuming and expensive fast.

→ No-code is like heading to Ikea - easy to assemble, affordable and (mostly!) reliable but difficult to customise if you want more than what the VOXLÖV has to offer.

→ Vibe-coding (in theory!) sits somewhere inbetween - you still get the flexibility to build something custom but instead of hiring a carpenter, you use conversational prompts to bring your design to life.

Challenges of Vibe-Coding

Although there are some big brand (and very well capitalised) vibe coding platforms like Lovable and Bolt.New out there already, it’s still very early days.

There’s also a lot more to building a functional platform than making it look good.

Developers think deeply about things like database structure, data relationships and secure connections — all the invisible layers that make a product stable and scalable.

In my opinion, that’s where vibe-coding still has some gaps! These tools are impressive in what they promise, but they don’t yet replace the thoughtful backend design and data security practices you’d expect from a production-grade build.

Enter Zite

Zite is a relatively new vibe-coding platform built by the same team behind Fillout Forms (which I’ve used a lot in the past).

I was intrigued by the offering because Fillout is incredibly solid software. The team ship updates regularly (and they do it with care and consistency - something I found a bit more chaotic with Softr).

That said (and like most new platforms), Zite still has gaps — especially around databases and some of the deeper automation logic.

To get around this, I’ve:

• Integrated Fillout + Airtable instead of relying on Zite’s native database

• Used Make and Zapier for more advanced workflows

Fillout is SOC2 compliant so gives me a secure way to handle data input and transfer.

This mix gives me the flexibility of a “vibe-coding” stack (modern design and visuals, API-ready and secure) but without the overhead or security concerns of custom code.

Where Things Are Now 🚀

The waitlist is live on the marketing site (created using Fillout + Zapier), and I’ve already built out most of the early user interfaces (sneak peak below 👀).

Over the next 7 - 10 days, I’ll be connecting Airtable with automation layers — finalising the onboarding flow and getting us ready to take on users!

It’s still early days, but I’ve been really impressed with what’s possible on Zite.

Every page of version 1.0 includes built-in ways for users to give feedback and report bugs, so we can refine the experience quickly as more people come on board.

That’s it for now!

Thanks for being here 🙏🏽

Khawar | Founder @ SOMOS 👋🏽

🌱 Subscribe to get new posts straight to your inbox.
📬 Reach out on LinkedIn if you’re building something similar, I’d love to connect.
💚 Check out our Blog for tips on how to build a fractional career in social impact.

Note: As a long-term user of both platforms, SOMOS recently joined Fillout and Unicorn Platform’s affiliate programmes and may receive commissions for referring new customers.

This is the first edition of Build With…🌱, a behind-the-scenes newsletter where I’ll be sharing stories, insights & lessons from:

• "Community-strapping" a social enterprise startup with no & low-code tools,

• Creating a platform for people to carry out meaningful social justice work without compromising their ethics, values or integrity,

• Grassroots activists and organizations doing incredible work.

But before we get into all that… let me take a step back and introduce some of what we’re trying to help with at SOMOS 🤝🏾...

Social justice - conceptually, practically and very much in reality - is under attack.

We're living in a world where international frameworks for governance are being routinely ignored when convenient, where even small, piecemeal changes won over the last few decades are facing a monumental backlash.

Simply trying to survive in systems designed to extract more than they give becomes harder every day.

Making Noise vs Shifting Power 💪🏾

If you were to spend the next 30 minutes scrolling your favourite social media sites, I'd bet you'd easily find a lot of coverage for a range of social justice issues.

Are some issues/viewpoints covered more than others? Yep.

Is shadow-banning a thing? Yep.

BUT is it easier than ever to make noise? Yep.

The bigger question? Where does all this noise get us?

Likes, comments, shares have been going up... BUT worker, migrant, language (and a whole host of other) rights and the freedoms to live and love how we want are being ruthlessly eroded.

Boring as it might sound, we need new structures and systems to shift power and navigate the global turmoil we're in.

As a startup founder, this is the bit where I'm meant to tell you how what I'm building gets to the root of all of this.

I can't do that - it wouldn't be true.

What I can say is this...

I want SOMOS to make it easier for people to carry out meaningful social justice work without compromising their ethics, values or integrity.

That feels like a good place to start.

Why I'm Building SOMOS 🤝

For the best part of a decade, I worked in commercial roles I hated to finance community work I loved.

I don't miss being on the inside of corporate law firms, banks or insurance companies but I am grateful for getting a clear understanding of the relentless damage these often spineless organisations do to the world.

The ground-up, community driven change we need isn't going to come from these places - whatever they put in their ESG reports or graduate recruitment websites.

It'll come from everyday people coming together to share their knowledge, experience and energy to build a better future for people and planet.

Here's the issue though...

• Social impact professionals might not be driven primarily by money, but they need to survive just like anyone else.

• Too many full-time roles rely on insecure grants, temporary funding, or political goodwill.

• One policy change, one budget cut, one leadership shuffle… and whole teams disappear.

The result?

Brilliant people are forced to leave roles they love (or avoid them altogether!) just to make rent or secure healthcare.

At the same time, the people best placed to drive change are often working across movements, borders and causes.

Someone fighting for migrant rights might also be advocating for language justice.

An educator challenging gender inequality might also be an artist, or a data analyst, or a community organiser.

This kind of generalist, fractional approach isn’t a weakness, it’s a strength.

It leads to deeper systems understanding, stronger coalitions, and more holistic change.

We just haven't built enough infrastructure to support it.

An Alternative Vision For Mission-Driven, Independent Work 🎯

SOMOS 🤝🏾 is an attempt to make a small contribution to the infrastructure we need.

We want to provide a platform that helps social impact leaders create flexible, purpose-driven careers across multiple causes without compromising their values or giving away their earnings to recruiters & marketplaces 🌱.

It's early days but version 1.0 will be a toolkit to:

→ Showcase experience, services & impact with a digital storefront & portfolio.

→ Offer monthly retainers or day passes without recruiter commissions.

→ Track earnings, clients & invoices

→ Come together with a network of mission-driven professionals

The Bigger Picture 🌍

SOMOS 🤝🏾 is a project with ambitious social justice goals.

In addition to developing a customer-centric product offering, I want us to be innovative in our recruitment, governance, community, and co-ownership approaches.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be diving deeper into some of the experiments I’ve been running behind the scenes to help get us where we want to be…

• Build With… Founder-Led Governance + Values-Aligned Investors: how our legal structure puts social purpose front and centre and how that can protect mission-driven founders long-term.

• Build With… Community Co-Owners: how we gifted equity to Conversation Over Borders and the benefits of including grassroots community organisations in your ownership structure.

• Build With… Inclusive Hiring: the process behind hiring, protecting and supporting refugee professionals in limbo.

• Build With… Others: how much it helps building alongside other mission-driven founders through spaces like Startups For All and Entrepreneurs for Palestine.

• Build With… No & Low Code Tools: an intro into how I’m building product at SOMOS.

If you're a founder, activist, consultant, or community builder who cares about building with care, not just code, I hope this series gives you something useful.

Thanks for being here 🙏🏽

Khawar | Founder @ SOMOS 👋🏽

🌱 Subscribe to get new posts straight to your inbox.
📬 Reach out on LinkedIn if you’re building something similar, I’d love to connect.
💚 Check out our Blog for tips on how to build a fractional career in social impact.