About This Project

The Idea

There are roughly 8 billion people alive on Earth right now. That's a number so large it's almost meaningless. We wanted to make it real. One click at a time.

CountEveryoneOnEarth.com is the world's simplest census. No sign-ups, no personal information, no apps to download. Just one button. Click it, and you become part of the count. You get a unique number that's yours forever.

How It Works

When you click the button, your browser creates an anonymous fingerprint (a combination of your screen size, timezone, language, and other technical signals). This fingerprint is hashed—meaning it's converted into a random-looking string that can't be reversed to identify you. We use this hash to make sure each person gets exactly one number.

Your number is sequential. Human #1 was the first person to click. Human #2 was the second. And so on, until we've counted every human on Earth.

Privacy

We take privacy seriously. Here's what we don't collect:

• No names • No email addresses • No phone numbers • No social media accounts • No cookies for tracking • No personal data of any kind

Here's what we do store: a 12-character anonymous hash, your sequential number, your country (determined from your IP address, which is not stored), and a timestamp.

Anti-Cheating

To keep the count honest, we use several layers of protection:

• Browser fingerprinting: Each unique device gets one number
• Rate limiting: Maximum 5 new numbers per IP address per day (for households with multiple people)
• Proof of work: Your browser solves a small computational puzzle before registering, making bot attacks expensive
• Shared device support: Family members on the same device can each get their own number

The Goal

Can we actually count all 8 billion? Probably not. But wouldn't it be amazing to try? Every number represents a real person who was here, who clicked, who said "I exist."

Right now, we've counted 1 humans. That's a start.

Share the Count

The only way this works is if people share it. When you get your number, share it! Post it on social media, send it to friends, text it to your family. Every share helps us get closer to counting everyone.

Technical Details

Built with FastAPI (Python), vanilla HTML/CSS/JS, and SQLite. No frameworks, no bloat. The entire page loads in under 50KB. GeoIP lookup uses the MaxMind GeoLite2 database for instant country detection with no external API calls.

View the country leaderboard to see where humans are being counted around the world.