Public browsing (no account needed)
Anyone can look at OnlyTons before signing up. There is a landing page at /
and a product catalogue at /explore, and neither asks for an account.
This page explains exactly what a visitor with no account can see, what they cannot, and why the line is drawn where it is.
The landing page
/ is where the platform explains itself, and it is the one page a prospect can
be sent a link to. It covers:
| Section | What it says |
|---|---|
| The three availability horizons | Available now · becoming available shortly · still to be planned. The middle and last ones are the point of the platform: supply can be secured before it exists. |
| Headline figures | Products in the catalogue, how many have availability, operators as a band, and how many growing areas. All aggregated the same way /explore is. |
| A managed market, not a directory | Profiles are not contact pages, operators never reach each other directly, and every step is checked and recorded. |
| Who it is for | Farms, trading companies, processors, agronomists and consultants, and buyers or importers — including small farms and growers at the margins of the market. |
| The eight use cases | Four buying, four selling, mirrored. Anything not built yet is marked In development. |
| How a transaction works | Search or publish → send the portal a request → the portal filters and forwards → terms are agreed and traced. |
| Being built next | Named modules, not hints: request buttons, land and maps, ratings, smart contracts, AI-assisted matching, blockchain audit, and tokenised production availability. |
| Transition and reach | The ecological and digital transition the project is built around, and where it operates — Italy and Europe first, in Italian and English. |
Two things about that list are deliberate. Anything the platform cannot do yet is either labelled In development or sits in Being built next, so the page can describe the whole model without implying a button exists. And the modules in the last group keep the conditions attached to them — a blockchain audit layer is "subject to assessment", and tokenisation covers production availability, never ownership of land and never a financial instrument.
What a visitor sees
| Thing | What is shown |
|---|---|
| Product catalogue | In full — name, category, taxonomy group, description. This is OnlyTons's own reference data; no operator appears in it. |
| Whether a product is available | Yes, as a range: "1–2", "3–9" or "10+" sellers. Never an exact count. |
| When it is available | By month. Never a date, and never a specific seller's window. |
| How much is available | As a band — under 1 t, 1–5 t, 5–20 t, 20–100 t, 100 t and above — totalled across every seller. Never a lot size. |
| Where it comes from | A broad area ("Southern Italy"), never a region, a town or a farm. |
| Certifications | The organic schemes present on the market, and roughly how many sellers hold each. Never a certifier or a certificate number. |
| Prices | Never. Not the amount, not the currency, and not even whether the seller quotes a fixed price or prices on request. |
| Who is selling | Never. Not the name, not a code, not a pseudonym. There is no seller object in the public data at all. |
| Land offered for a future crop | Yes — by district, and parcel by parcel, with soil, water, aspect, altitude, organic status and candidate crops. Positions are 11 km cells, surfaces are ranges, and a district only appears once three different operators offer land in it. See Land. |
| What buyers are looking for | Not published in this version. A buyer's requirement is their purchasing plan. |
| This manual | In full, at /docs, in both languages. It is documentation rather than market data: no operator, no listing and no figure from the database appears in it. |
Anything withheld is labelled on the page — a lock and a one-line reason — rather than quietly left out.
Why quantities and dates are ranges
Take a listing like "42.5 t durum wheat, Puglia, 3–20 September". There is no name in it. Anyone who works in the Puglia durum trade can still tell you whose it is: the quantity, the window and the area together are a fingerprint, even though no single one of them is a name.
So the public tier publishes a band instead of a number and a month instead of a date, and it totals across every seller before it publishes anything. Two producers offering 9 t and 8 t become "5–20 t" as one figure, and neither of them can be read back out of it.
Land, and why a whole district can disappear
/explore/land shows offered land the same way the product pages show
availability: aggregated first, and only then in detail. The difference is that a
parcel belongs to exactly one operator, so there is no aggregate to hide inside.
OnlyTons's answer is that a parcel is published only when it is indistinguishable from its neighbours. A district appears only once at least three different operators offer land in it, and below that the district and every parcel in it vanish from the public site completely — the pages, the list and the sitemap. In a thin market a map marker is the farm, and there is no redaction that fixes that; the honest outcome is that the pages do not exist, and the page says so.
The check is made fresh every time, so a parcel becomes public when a third operator joins its district and stops being public when one leaves.
Why some months say "Area withheld"
When a month has fewer than three distinct sellers in an area, that "aggregate" is those sellers. With one seller the aggregate is their listing; with two, anyone who knows they are one of the two has identified the other by elimination.
In that case the area and the quantity are both dropped and the month shows only that something is available. They go together on purpose: a suppressed area next to a published quantity would tell a competitor exactly which of the two growers it is.
The same rule applies to certification badges. A scheme held by one seller is that seller — "the only biodynamic grower in the district" is a name with extra steps. A scheme with fewer than three holders is not listed on its own; its holders are still counted in the overall organic figure, which pools every organic scheme and usually clears the threshold when no single scheme does.
Why creating an account does not reveal the seller
This is the part that is easy to misread, so it is worth stating plainly:
registering does not unmask anybody. Operator identities are protected by
design at every tier. A signed-in, approved member sees individual listings with
a pseudonymous handle (OP-7K3QMD) and a coarsened area — never a company name.
Even inside a live deal, the counterparty is "Supplier A", and OnlyTons is the
party of record on both sides.
See Operator privacy for the full picture, and Registration & approval for what an account actually gets you.
What an account does get you
| What you can see | Visitor | Signed in, awaiting approval | Approved |
|---|---|---|---|
Landing page and /explore | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Individual listings, with windows and quantities | — | ✓ | ✓ |
| Pseudonymous seller handles, certification badges | — | ✓ | ✓ |
| Prices (where the seller publishes one) | — | ✓ | ✓ |
| Buyers' open requirements | — | ✓ | ✓ |
| Post supply or demand | — | — | ✓ |
| Ask about a listing | — | — | ✓ |
| Take part in a deal | — | — | ✓ |
A signed-in member visiting /explore sees exactly what a visitor sees — the
page is the same for everyone. The only difference is the header, which offers
"Open the full listings" instead of "Create a free account".
The two buttons on a product page carry your intent through signup. "I have this to sell" and "I want to buy this" take you to registration, and the setup wizard then arrives with the right capability already ticked and that product offered as a one-click addition to what you handle. You never have to remember what you clicked.
Freshness
Public pages are cached for five minutes, so a change can take that long to appear. That is deliberate as well as fast: without it, someone watching a thin product could learn the exact minute a seller published, which is a way around every range on the page.
It blunts that, it does not eliminate it — see the note on time-series observation in the engineering register.
Languages
Public pages are available in English and Italian, like the rest of OnlyTons.
Inside the app your language is a saved preference. On public pages it is also a
link: ?lang=it renders the page in Italian and can be shared or bookmarked.
A first-time visitor with no preference saved gets whichever of the two languages
their browser asks for. See Languages & localization.
Depth
Public browsing paginates 20 pages deep, at 24 products a page. Beyond that the answer is to filter, not to keep clicking — which is also what stops the public pages being a convenient bulk download.
Turning it off
The market tier can be switched off in configuration
(PUBLIC_TIER_ENABLED=false). It exists so that a problem can be closed by a
setting rather than by an emergency code change.
What the switch closes is the part of this page that reads operator data:
| Surface | With the switch off |
|---|---|
/explore and everything under it, including land | Asks for a sign-in |
| The headline figures on the landing page | Removed from the page |
| The "Explore products" and "Land" links in the header and footer | Removed |
robots.txt | Moves /explore from allow to disallow |
What stays open, always:
| Surface | Why |
|---|---|
The landing page at / | It is how the platform explains itself, and a product whose front door a setting can turn into a login form has no front door. With the switch off it keeps every section except the headline figures. |
This manual at /docs | The switch closes the market tier — the aggregates over what operators have listed — and a manual is not market data. Two of its pages are commitments rather than marketing: the accessibility statement and the reliability methodology are published because people are entitled to read them, and a commitment a configuration flag can withdraw was never a commitment. |
robots.txt and sitemap.xml | Both keep being served, and both narrow their own contents. Redirecting a search engine to a login page tells it nothing; telling it which pages are open and which are closed is the honest answer. |
Before 9 August 2026 the switch also took down the landing page, robots.txt
and the sitemap. That was wrong in a way worth recording, because it is the
question this section exists to answer: not publishing a market is a commercial
decision, and it should never have been the same decision as not having a
website.