# The deck I could not download: an author-first home for presentations, as a business plan somebody else can build, sgit.ai

> I wanted one presentation from SlideShare and was offered a 30-day trial and then £10.99 a month. The author of the deck receives nothing from that subscription, under an uploader agreement that grants the platform a royalty-free licence to monetise, charge for, sublicense and train models on the work, and I am one of those authors, with 69 decks uploaded over fifteen years. This article does three things. It says what happened to SlideShare, from a 2006 start through LinkedIn and Scribd to the September 2021 paywall, and why a service with a PDF viewer and a file store has not been replaced: fifteen years of embeds and links, which is inertia in Wardley's sense. It sets out what an author can ask the old platform for today, under the right of access and, in the EU, the copyright transparency duty, including the two questions platforms do not expect, how many downloads and what revenue. And it designs the service the author would have chosen, on the primitives this site already publishes: every author's decks in a vault the host cannot read, access decided by keys rather than settings, a read key for what is free, a receipt turned into a ten-minute key for what is paid once, a revocable grant for what is private, decryption in the browser, an attested enclave for the one step that needs plaintext, seven roles that no single company holds, and a split of 85% to the author on a ledger the author can recompute. The plan is published as a vault with a working mock, the Deck Vault, with its economics worked for one author and its risks as an acceptance register. The marginal cost is storage and bandwidth, which are near zero; the hard row is the fixed part of a card fee, which the plan says so about rather than hides. Somebody should build it. The author will build the first step for their own decks.

*Source: <https://sgit.ai/articles/the-deck-i-could-not-download.html> · site v0.6.77 · this file is generated from the same content as the page, so the two cannot drift. Every page on this site has a `.md` twin; internal links below point at them.*

---

[Home](../index.md) / [Articles](index.md) / The deck I could not download: an author-first home for presentations, as a business plan somebody else can build

# The deck I could not download: an author-first home for presentations, as a business plan somebody else can build

By [Dinis Cruz](../about/index.md) · 2026-10-06 · updated 2026-10-06 · [v0.6.77](../admin/versions.md) · slidesharecontent-creatorsbusiness-plansvaultssgitencryptionpkimicropaymentsprovenancegdprright-of-accesscopyrightwardley-mapsinertiaarticle

***Abstract:** I wanted one presentation from SlideShare and was offered a 30-day trial and then £10.99 a month. The author of the deck receives nothing from that subscription, under an uploader agreement that grants the platform a royalty-free licence to monetise, charge for, sublicense and train models on the work, and I am one of those authors, with 69 decks uploaded over fifteen years. This article does three things. It says what happened to SlideShare, from a 2006 start through LinkedIn and Scribd to the September 2021 paywall, and why a service with a PDF viewer and a file store has not been replaced: fifteen years of embeds and links, which is inertia in Wardley's sense. It sets out what an author can ask the old platform for today, under the right of access and, in the EU, the copyright transparency duty, including the two questions platforms do not expect, how many downloads and what revenue. And it designs the service the author would have chosen, on the primitives this site already publishes: every author's decks in a vault the host cannot read, access decided by keys rather than settings, a read key for what is free, a receipt turned into a ten-minute key for what is paid once, a revocable grant for what is private, decryption in the browser, an attested enclave for the one step that needs plaintext, seven roles that no single company holds, and a split of 85% to the author on a ledger the author can recompute. The plan is published as a vault with a working mock, the Deck Vault, with its economics worked for one author and its risks as an acceptance register. The marginal cost is storage and bandwidth, which are near zero; the hard row is the fixed part of a card fee, which the plan says so about rather than hides. Somebody should build it. The author will build the first step for their own decks.*

The screen that started this, as shown to a reader on 6 October 2026, with the deck and its author left out of the crop. One download offered as a subscription; the author of the deck receives nothing from it. The three complaints, and the one that is not: the licence the author signed allows all of it.

**Where this comes from.** A LinkedIn post on 6 October 2026, after I tried to download one presentation and met the subscription screen, and a voice memo the same day about what a service built for authors would look like on the primitives this site publishes. I am a party to this: I have 69 presentations on SlideShare, uploaded since the platform's early years, and mine can be downloaded without an account because I switched the setting on. The author of the deck I wanted had not, which is the common case. The facts about SlideShare and Scribd below are from their own help pages and terms and from press reports, each dated; where a number could only be observed, the UK price for one, it is marked as my observation. The design is published as a vault with a working mock, [Deck Vault](../demos/vaults/deck-vault/index.md), and the plan is given away, as the other [business plans on this site](../startups/business-plans.md) are.

## In short

- **One download, one subscription decision.** The reader is offered a 30-day trial and then £10.99 a month, $11.99 in the US. There is no one-off option unless the author switched one on, and the setting was reported as off by default when the paywall arrived in September 2021.
- **The author receives nothing, by agreement.** The uploader agreement of August 2024 says it "does not entitle You to any payment, royalties, remuneration, or other compensation", and grants a royalty-free, sublicensable licence to "monetize, charge money for, restrict access to view, restrict access to download, advertise against, create derivative works from, train machine learning, large language, or other statistical or data models" the work. The same company forbids its users from training models on the same content.
- **Why it has not been replaced.** Fifteen years of embeds, backlinks and search ranking point at one domain, and about forty million visits a month still arrive, most from search. That is inertia, and it is a stronger moat than the technology.
- **What an author can ask today.** A right-of-access request for the counts and the recipients, with the European Data Protection Board's guidance that derived data counts and the Court of Justice's ruling that recipients must be named; and, in EU states that implemented it without a payment condition, the copyright transparency duty on "all revenues generated". The UK did not implement that duty.
- **The design.** Every author's decks in a vault the host cannot read. Keys decide access: a read key for what is free, a receipt turned into a ten-minute key for what is paid once, a revocable grant for what is private. Decryption in the browser. Seven roles, no single owner. The author takes 85%, on a ledger in their own vault.
- **The economics.** Serving one author's whole shelf for a month costs less than the incumbent charges one reader for one download. The hard row is the card fee, 1.5% plus 20p with a 30p minimum, which eats a fifth of a one-pound download; wallets, batching and an open payments protocol are how the plan gets under it.
- **Status.** A plan and a mock, published as a vault with a read key. Nothing in the build order beyond the vault exists. The author will build the first step for their own 69 decks.

## What happened to SlideShare

SlideShare was founded in October 2006 as a place to upload a deck, embed it anywhere and link to it, and it spread because it worked. LinkedIn bought it in May 2012 for about $119 million. Microsoft bought LinkedIn in 2016. In August 2020 LinkedIn announced that Scribd was acquiring SlideShare, with operations moving over on 24 September 2020 and forty million presentations cited. Scribd's own help page from that month said that users would not need a subscription to access or upload, but that "for full access, including the ability to download content directly to your device, a subscription is required" from September 2021. When the paywall arrived, authors found an account-level checkbox, "Allow users to read and download your slideshows without a subscription", which one writer who documented it in October 2021 reported as off by default. The checkbox still exists in Scribd's 2025 help pages, with a per-upload toggle beside it. Scribd's corporate site in 2026 describes SlideShare as twenty-five million presentations, which is fifteen million fewer than the number cited at the sale; the company has not explained the difference publicly.

Twenty years of one service. The owner changed twice and the terms changed once; the links did not change at all. In Wardley's terms this is inertia, and it is also the opening.

**Why nothing replaced it.** Third-party traffic estimates put slideshare.net at thirty-six to forty-three million visits a month across 2025 and 2026, with seventy to eighty per cent arriving from search and India the largest country. The service persists as a search artefact: every public deck is indexed, embedded on conference pages and blogs, and linked from the decks that cite it. Simon Wardley's observation is the right one: "Past success breeds inertia." For years the balance was good enough that few authors thought about the terms, and a service people feel good about linking to is shared; the sharing built the moat before the terms moved. A replacement needs the authors to move, and the authors' links are the thing the incumbent holds. None of the alternatives I looked at pays authors per download; the only author-payment model among them is a pooled royalty with an unpublished rate.

## What the author agreed to

I want to be precise here because the complaint is easy to overstate. The uploader keeps copyright. The licence is non-exclusive. I uploaded most of my decks under a Creative Commons licence and I am content for them to be shared. What the author grants, in the agreement last updated on 1 August 2024, is "a worldwide, non-exclusive, transferable, assignable, fully paid-up, royalty-free license (with the right to grant and authorize sublicenses)" to, among other things, "monetize, charge money for, restrict access to view, restrict access to download, advertise against, create derivative works from, train machine learning, large language, or other statistical or data models, and otherwise exploit Your Content", and the agreement says it "does not entitle You to any payment, royalties, remuneration, or other compensation in exchange for posting Your Content." The general terms, updated in September 2026, forbid users from using "any content made available through the Services for the purpose of training, fine-tuning, or otherwise developing a large language model". The right the platform reserves for itself it withholds from its users. Whether the right has been exercised, I could not find out; no public report of a licensing deal or of the corpus in a named training set turned up, and the dashboard does not say.

So the three complaints are these. The reader is sold a subscription for one file that the author would have given away or sold for a pound. The author has no say and no share, and cannot change the terms for their own work except by deleting it. And the author does not know where the work went. The licence allows all three, which is why the complaint is not that anyone broke a rule. It is that the service an author would have chosen does not exist, and in 2026 it could.

## What an author can ask for today

Before designing anything, there is the question of what an author can do with the platform they are already on. Three things.

**Switch the setting on.** Readers can then download without a subscription. It is per account, with a per-upload override, and it is the reason my decks can be downloaded and the deck I wanted could not.

**Send a right-of-access request**, under GDPR Article 15 or its UK equivalent, asking the ordinary things and two unusual ones. First, the view and download counts recorded against each upload, by month. The platform's likely answer is that these are statistics about content, not personal data. The author's answer is that a count held against a named author's upload, in that author's account, relates to an identifiable person: the European Data Protection Board's guidelines on the right of access say it "includes both inferred and derived data, including personal data created by a service provider", and the Court of Justice has held that information relates to a person where "by reason of its content, purpose or effect, it is linked" to them. Second, the recipients: whether the uploads or text from them have been licensed to third parties, including for training, and to whom. The Court of Justice ruled in January 2023 that a controller must name the actual recipients where it can, not only categories. The deadline is one month, extendable by two with notice. A revenue figure is harder to compel, because the access right discloses data that is processed rather than creating a new statistic, and a subscription platform may not attribute revenue to authors at all; but "we do not compute it" is an answer worth having in writing. The letter is in the vault, as a template.

**In the EU, ask under copyright law.** Article 19 of the 2019 Copyright Directive gives authors the right to receive, at least once a year, "up to date, relevant and comprehensive information on the exploitation of their works ... in particular as regards modes of exploitation, all revenues generated and remuneration due" from those they licensed. Whether a royalty-free upload licence falls within it is untested: Germany's implementation applies only to licences granted for payment, France's has no such condition, and no case on a user-generated-content platform was found. The UK said in January 2020 it would not implement the Directive, so a UK author has the access right and the terms, and nothing else.

I will send the request for my own 69 decks, and the answer goes in the first article the ledger below is built for.

## The design: the author holds the keys

Now the service I would have chosen. It is built from things this site already documents, and the vault at the end of this article is the plan with a working mock.

Every author gets a vault the host cannot read. Who may open a deck is decided by which key a device holds: a publishing key for the author, a content key per deck, a read key for what is free, a receipt turned into a ten-minute key for what is paid once, and a revocable grant for what is private. Design sketch; proposal.

**Every author gets a vault.** An encrypted, versioned store of their own files, on any host, that nobody who does not hold a key can read, including the host. The author's device encrypts a deck before it leaves; the host receives ciphertext and a size. That one decision carries the rest, because a service that cannot read the content cannot sell it, index it for someone else, or change the terms under which it is read. This is the sgit vault model, which [the security page](../security/index.md) describes and which the team in [the previous articles](../articles/the-agent-team-as-it-runs.md) runs on.

**Keys, not settings.** The author's publishing key is bound to a passkey on their device and signs every decision: access rules, grants, revocations, content credentials, licences. Each deck is encrypted under its own content key, wrapped to the publishing key, so re-keying one deck touches nothing else. A read key per deck, derived one way from the content key as [vault credentials](../docs/credentials.md) describes, is published for decks the author marks read-free; it cannot write and cannot be turned back. A grant is the content key wrapped to a recipient's public key with an expiry, signed by the author; revocation is a signed statement and a re-key. And a receipt from the payments service, for a one-off payment, is turned by an attested enclave into the content key wrapped to the reader's device for ten minutes. A setting lives on a server and changes when the server's owner changes. A key lives with the author and is verified by anyone.

**Decryption on the client.** The reader's browser fetches ciphertext and decrypts it in the tab, as every vault page on this site does today. No account to read what is free. The one bounded exception is the unlock service, an attested enclave that handles one deck's plaintext in memory for one request, to wrap a key, render a preview or build an index, and whose operator cannot read it; the device checks the attestation before trusting it, in the way [the personal agent design](../articles/a-personal-agent-that-keeps-your-secrets.md) set out this morning.

## Seven roles, no single owner

The incumbent is one company holding the files, the keys, the payments, the identities and the front page, which is what lets the terms change for everyone at once and what makes it one thing to buy and sell. The plan separates the roles so that no party holds more than one of the content, the keys and the money, and so that each can be provided by several parties the author chooses between.

Seven roles: storage host, key service, unlock service, payments, identity and provenance, the front, and add-ons. What each does, what each sees, who could run it, and which exist today. Sovereignty by construction: an archive can hold a nation's authors' ciphertext without reading it.

The storage host stores the vault and serves ciphertext to key-holders; it sees sizes and timings, and it can be any object store, a national archive, a university, or the author's own bucket. The key service publishes public keys and bindings and records grants and revocations as signed statements; it never holds a private key. The unlock service is the enclave. The payments service takes a one-off payment, issues a signed receipt the enclave accepts, settles to the author and publishes a statement the author can recompute. The identity service binds the publishing key to a person in tiers, from key-only through a domain or ORCID binding to a verified identity or an institution's signature, and signs content credentials. The front is the website people see, and because it works from a read key alone, several fronts can list the same vaults; the mock in the vault is one. Add-ons, a semantic graph of a deck, an infographic, question answering, a translation, run inside the enclave on the plaintext, are approved by the author before they are sold, and pay the author the same share.

The sovereignty follows from the separation. Each role can be provided per country, per profession or per company. An archive can hold its authors' ciphertext without being able to read it, which is a role archives already understand. A professional body can verify identities without touching the files. A cooperative of authors can run the payments. An author moves between providers by changing a key binding, not by migrating content, which is the shape [the supply chain of vaults](../articles/supply-chain-of-vaults.md) argued for one domain over.

## The flows

Pay once and download the original. The payments service sees a payment, the enclave sees a receipt, the host sees a read; none sees all three. The ledger line goes into the author's vault, and the month's statement is computed from lines like it.

**Read for free.** The reader opens the deck on any front. The browser fetches ciphertext with the deck's read key and decrypts it. The front appends a read to the author's ledger through a write-only lane: a count, not a person.

**Pay once and download the original.** The reader presses Download original and sees the price the author set, the author's 85% and the platform's 15%. The payments service takes the payment and issues a signed receipt naming the deck's hash, valid for minutes. The enclave checks the receipt and the author's access rule and wraps the content key to the reader's device for ten minutes. The browser downloads the ciphertext and decrypts the original locally. The ledger line names the deck, the amount, the split, the receipt and the hash served. No subscription is offered for a single file; a subscription is allowed for a reader who wants thirty a month, and its revenue is split to authors by downloads on the same statement.

**Share privately, and take it back.** For a deck marked by grant only, the author wraps the content key to a recipient's public key with an expiry and signs the grant. To revoke, the author signs a revocation; the enclave stops honouring the grant at once and the deck is re-keyed on the next commit. A file already downloaded is the reader's, and the plan says so on every grant rather than pretending otherwise.

**Publish, and migrate.** The author drops a file; the browser hashes and encrypts it and commits the ciphertext; the identity service signs a content credential; the enclave produces a preview and an index. Migration from the incumbent is downloading one's own decks, for authors who switched the setting on, and publishing them with permanent per-deck addresses and an embed that works from a read key, so the links that pointed at the old domain can be updated once.

## The economics of one author

Serving an author's whole shelf for a month costs less than the incumbent charges one reader for one download. Where a one-off price goes by card, from 50p to the incumbent's subscription for scale: under a pound the rail eats the price. Illustrative figures with list prices as inputs.

Take my own case: 69 decks, about 5 MB each, 345 MB in all. Object storage at list price is about $0.015 per gigabyte-month on a provider that charges nothing for egress, and up to $0.09 per gigabyte of egress on one that does. Serving 400 downloads and 9,000 reads a month, with a 1 MB preview per read, costs between nothing and under a pound. Two seconds of enclave time per unlock adds less than a penny. The whole month's infrastructure for an author's shelf costs less than the incumbent charges one reader for one download.

| For one author, a month |  |
|---|---|
| Decks | 69, about 5 MB each |
| Storage | under 1p |
| Bandwidth | 0p to 77p, depending on the host's egress price |
| Enclave time | under 1p |
| The incumbent's price for one download | £10.99 a month after a 30-day trial |

The thing that does not scale down is the payment. A UK card through a mainstream processor costs 1.5% plus 20p with a 30p minimum, so a 50p download loses two fifths of its price to the rail, a £1 download loses about a fifth, and the plan's default of £1.50 loses about fifteen per cent. The plan's answer is to state this rather than hide it. The split is 85% to the author and 15% to the platform, and the platform pays the card fee out of its 15%, which at the default price leaves it almost nothing on a card payment. The platform's margin is in wallet top-ups, where one card fee covers several downloads, in batching settlements, and in add-ons at a 70% author share; it is not in the author's share. An open payments protocol moved to a foundation in 2026 with card networks and processors among its members and is settling machine-to-machine payments at fractions of a cent, so the first readers to pay per download cheaply may be agents; a person still needs a wallet, and the plan's first open question is which rail a UK or EU front can offer a person at under five pence a transaction.

The positive loop the plan bets on: authors who are paid publish more and publish here first; readers who are not sold a subscription for one file come back; fronts compete on discovery and on the share they take, because the content is not theirs to lock.

## What the service sells: provenance

Strip the storage and payments away and what remains is the thing a reader cannot get anywhere else: assurance that this file, with this hash, was published by this person, who is who they say they are. Every deck already carries a signature over its hash from a key bound to an identity, so the assurance is cheap to produce. A conference wants to know the decks on its page are the speakers'. An employer wants to know a candidate's deck is theirs. A journalist wants a date that cannot move. A reader wants to know the version they are reading is the one that was published and the forty copies elsewhere are copies. On the incumbent, an upload is bound to an account and an account to an email; here it is bound to a key, and the key to a person in tiers the badge names. This is the argument [the news articles](../articles/future-of-news-story-vault-not-paywall.md) on this site made about selling provenance and trust, applied to presentations.

## The vault

The plan is published as a vault, [Deck Vault](../demos/vaults/deck-vault/index.md), with a read key on its page. It holds ten plan documents, the data behind them, the right-of-access letter, a register of ten risks written as acceptances with a holder and a date, and a working mock: the shelf of a fictional author with twelve decks, a deck page with pay-once and the split, the author's own view with a statement they can recompute from the ledger, the seven roles, the five flows, the economics and the rights. The app is built as web components in the shape [coding.sgit.ai](https://coding.sgit.ai/javascript/index.html) documents, three files per component on one base, bundled into one file for the vault host by a script in the vault; the source stays split so the tool can be reviewed as code, as [the review brief](../docs/briefs/code-review-graphs-in-the-repository.md) asks. Press the pay button on a deck and the ledger line appears on the author's view.

A deck page in the mock, after the pay button: the content credential, the hash, read free in the browser, pay once with the split shown, and the ledger line the payment would write. Fictional author and deck.The author's own view: the September statement with the add-ons' share, the ledger as it is written, the keys and grants with a mock revoke, and what each of the seven services knows about the author. Nothing in the last list can read a slide except the enclave for one request and the author's own device.

## What exists, and what does not

Vaults with client-side encryption, one-way read keys, write-only lanes and decryption in the browser exist and are documented with their limits on this site. Confidential compute with attested key release is sold by three cloud vendors. Payment processors issue receipts; identity verifiers charge a few dollars a check; content credentials ship in cameras and phones; the EU's identity wallets are due by the end of 2026. The Agent Behaviour Policy for the platform's agents is written in the vault.

What does not exist: the unlock enclave for decks, the per-task key release, grants and revocation as a service, the receipt that becomes a key, a front that lists a vault from a read key alone, the migration tool, and any payment rail that gets a person under five pence a transaction in the UK. The vault's build order has nine steps, and step zero is one author's shelf as a vault with per-deck read keys and an embed per deck. I will build step zero for my own decks, because I want a home for them that I hold the keys to. The rest is for whoever takes the plan; what they may not do and still call it this is written in the vault's last chapter.

## Threads woven here

- [The agent team as it runs](../articles/the-agent-team-as-it-runs.md) and [A personal agent that keeps your secrets](../articles/a-personal-agent-that-keeps-your-secrets.md): the vault properties, the three classes of information, and the enclave with per-task key release this plan reuses.
- [A supply chain of vaults](../articles/supply-chain-of-vaults.md): one vault per party, lanes between them, no platform in the middle.
- [The future of news is the story vault, not the paywall](../articles/future-of-news-story-vault-not-paywall.md) and [The reader was always the product](../articles/how-news-got-here.md): selling provenance rather than access, and what platforms did to the people who made the content.
- [The SaaS apocalypse will be decided by inertia, not by AI](../articles/saas-apocalypse-decided-by-inertia-not-by-ai.md): the same Wardley point, applied to the incumbents of software.
- [Vault credentials](../docs/credentials.md), [the security model](../security/index.md) and [append-lane messaging](../docs/append-lane-messaging.md): the read key, what the host sees, and the write-only lane the ledger uses.
- [Business plans for founders](../startups/business-plans.md): the other plans given away on this site, and how to take one.

## Sources

- Scribd, [Uploader Agreement for Scribd and Slideshare](https://support.scribd.com/hc/en-us/articles/210129466-Uploader-Agreement-for-Scribd-and-Slideshare), last updated 1 August 2024; [General Terms of Use](https://support.scribd.com/hc/en-us/articles/210129326-General-Terms-of-Use), as shown on 6 October 2026; [Scribd and Slideshare, August 2020](https://support.scribd.com/hc/en-us/articles/360046766031-Scribd-Slideshare-August-2020); [Your Slideshare content settings and licensing](https://support.scribd.com/hc/en-us/articles/360055664591-Your-Slideshare-content-settings-and-licensing) and [Managing your Slideshare download permissions](https://support.scribd.com/hc/en-us/articles/360055662871-Managing-your-Slideshare-download-permissions), updated September 2025; [Scribd, Inc.](https://www.scribdinc.com/), 2026.
- LinkedIn, [Scribd is acquiring SlideShare](https://news.linkedin.com/2020/august/digital-library-leader-scribd-is-acquiring-slideshare), 11 August 2020; [VentureBeat on the 2012 acquisition](https://venturebeat.com/entrepreneur/linkedin-buys-slideshare); Terence Eden, [SlideShare is selling your old slides](https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/10/slideshare-is-selling-your-old-slides-heres-how-to-stop-it/), 8 October 2021; [Similarweb, slideshare.net](https://www.similarweb.com/website/slideshare.net/), 2025 and 2026.
- Simon Wardley, [Exploring the map](https://blog.gardeviance.org/2016/08/exploring-map.html), 12 August 2016.
- [GDPR Article 15](https://gdpr-info.eu/art-15-gdpr/) and [Article 20](https://gdpr-info.eu/art-20-gdpr/); EDPB, [Guidelines 01/2022 on data subject rights, right of access](https://www.edpb.europa.eu/system/files/2023-04/edpb_guidelines_202201_data_subject_rights_access_v2_en.pdf), version 2.0, 2023; CJEU, [Nowak, C-434/16](https://www.dataprotection.ie/sites/default/files/uploads/2018-11/20_12_17%20CJEU%20Nowak%20Judgment.pdf), 2017, and [Österreichische Post, C-154/21](https://curia.europa.eu/site/upload/docs/application/pdf/2023-01/cp230004en.pdf), 2023; ICO, [A guide to subject access](https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/uk-gdpr-guidance-and-resources/subject-access-requests/a-guide-to-subject-access/).
- [Directive (EU) 2019/790, Article 19](https://www.legislation.gov.uk/eudr/2019/790/article/19); the UK position, [January 2020](https://musically.com/2020/01/27/uk-government-wont-implement-the-european-copyright-directive/); Germany's [§32d UrhG](https://dejure.org/gesetze/UrhG/32d.html).
- Stripe, [UK pricing](https://stripe.com/gb/pricing) and [minimum charge amounts](https://docs.stripe.com/currencies); Cloudflare, [R2 pricing](https://developers.cloudflare.com/r2/pricing/); Backblaze, [B2 pricing](https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-storage/pricing); Linux Foundation, [the x402 Foundation](https://www.linuxfoundation.org/press/linux-foundation-is-launching-the-x402-foundation-and-welcoming-the-contribution-of-the-x402-protocol), 2026.
- [EU Digital Identity Wallet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EU_Digital_Identity_Wallet); [C2PA adoption, 2026](https://www.softwareseni.com/c2pa-adoption-in-2026-hardware-platforms-and-verification-reality/); [identity verification pricing](https://trustswiftly.com/blog/identity-verification-pricing-comparison-and-alternatives/).
- Competitors checked: [Speaker Deck](https://speakerdeck.com/), [Canva Creators](https://www.canva.com/help/canva-creators-program/), and the others listed in the vault's research notes.

*Drafted from a LinkedIn post and a voice memo by Dinis Cruz, who is the author of the argument and the person with editorial responsibility, by agent@riskmandate.ai (Claude Fable 5.1, claude-fable-5-1) in the sgit.ai site session, on 6 October 2026. A research pass over SlideShare's terms and history, the data protection and copyright authorities, payment rails, storage prices and identity services preceded the writing; each fact is dated and marked as a vendor statement, a report or an observation. The paywall figure is the author's own screenshot, cropped to leave out the deck and its author. The vault's author, decks, counts and amounts are fictional. The author's own SlideShare profile could not be read by the research tooling, which the site served a script challenge, so its counts are as the author reported them.*

*© 2026 Dinis Cruz. This article's own text is licensed under [CC BY 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). You're free to share and adapt it, as long as you give credit. Quoted material and linked sources keep their own licences.*

## Threads

Startups & strategyVaults & method[This article as a graph →](graphs.md#the-deck-i-could-not-download)

### Builds on

- [The agent team as it runs: one person, twelve agents, encrypted vaults, and a mailbox nobody sends from](the-agent-team-as-it-runs.md) Twelve agents on dedicated accounts, encrypted vaults as the only memory, messages as files, a folder per person, and a mailbox nobody sends from.
- [A personal agent that keeps your secrets: the 2026 agents read through behaviour policy and encryption, and a privacy-first design on vaults, enclaves and the browser](a-personal-agent-that-keeps-your-secrets.md) The 2026 personal agents read through behaviour policy and encryption, and a design on vaults, an attested enclave and the browser where no vendor holds a key.
- [A supply chain of vaults: how GenAI, open data and small custom tools could bring the price of food down](supply-chain-of-vaults.md) The food chain is a data problem: one encrypted vault per party, joined by append lanes and a typed graph, could cut the waste that keeps prices high.
- [The future of news is the story vault, not the paywall](future-of-news-story-vault-not-paywall.md) A story is a graph of claims and evidence and the article is one projection of it; keep the graph in a vault and sell what the article was made from.
- [The reader was always the product: a corrected history of how news got into this mess](how-news-got-here.md) News has sold the reader to advertisers since 1833; the web took the monopoly, the platforms made the reader measurable, and AI took the traffic.
- [The SaaS apocalypse will be decided by inertia, not by AI](saas-apocalypse-decided-by-inertia-not-by-ai.md) Incumbents and newcomers have the same AI; what separates them is how much past success each has to protect, so inertia decides which SaaS companies survive.

[All articles](index.md) · [All graphs](graphs.md)

**Get new articles by email.** The HTML version of this page has a form that encrypts your address in the browser and drops it into a write-only lane on an encrypted vault, read by the agent that manages the list ([how it works](../docs/briefs/subscribe-lane-agent-brief.md)). Or email [agent@riskmandate.ai](mailto:agent@riskmandate.ai?subject=Subscribe%3A%20sgit.ai%20articles&body=Please%20add%20me%20to%20the%20list%20for%20new%20sgit.ai%20articles.) with the subject "Subscribe: sgit.ai articles".

[← All articles](index.md)


---

*[Site index for agents](../llms.txt) · [HTML version](https://sgit.ai/articles/the-deck-i-could-not-download.html)*