Rules

Two boards. On the sponsored board, rank is the bid. In the Arena, rank is verified sales and no amount of money moves a row. No ads, no revenue share, no editorial judgement.

The sponsored rules below are enforced in code today. The Arena rules describe the board it opens as — they are written here first, so nobody connects a payment provider to a set of rules they haven't read.

How sponsored ranking works

Bids are whole US dollars per week. The floor is $5 and the ceiling is $999,999.
Taking #1 costs at least $5 above the current top bid. Every other rank costs $1 above its current holder.
Bidding less than the top still puts you on the board, at whatever rank that amount reaches.
Equal bids keep the order they were placed. The older bid holds the higher rank, so nobody takes a position by matching it.
Enter the same URL or handle again to raise your bid. You pay only the difference, and your position age carries over.
Set a ceiling and we raise your bid automatically by the minimum step when someone outbids you, until the ceiling is reached.
Every listing belongs to a category, read automatically from the page you link. Category boards rank the same bids against a smaller field, so each category has its own #1.
Every bid — even the floor — takes the front row. The most recent bids on the board sit above the leaderboard on the home page, one spot per listing, until newer bids push them along.

Chip-ins

Anyone can pay to push any listing up the board — not just its owner. Chip-ins convert to rank the moment the payment settles; there is no goal to reach first and no escrow.
A chip-in counts on top of the standing bid until the listing's next weekly renewal, then it expires. The owner is never charged for money others put in.
Outbidding a chipped-up listing means beating the standing bid plus its chip-ins.
Backer names are public on the listing page. Chip-ins are not refundable once applied.

Billing

Your bid is a weekly amount. The card you pay with is charged again every seven days to hold the rank.
Cancel any time by replying to any email from the board. Billing stops immediately and the rank opens back up.
If a renewal fails you keep the rank for 3 more days while you fix the card. After that the listing comes off the board.
Raises are charged as the difference, immediately. Renewals then continue at the new amount.
A completed payment is what claims a rank. Starting checkout reserves nothing.

What you can list

A product website, or an X handle.
One bid per product. Different paths on the same domain are the same listing, so the board can't be papered with twenty URLs from one site.
App Store, Play Store, and GitHub links are keyed by their path, so separate apps and repos are separate listings.
Query strings are stripped from every listing link. Affiliate, referral, and tracking URLs will not survive.
Link shorteners are resolved to their destination, and the destination is what gets judged.
No chat or invite links — Telegram, WhatsApp, Discord, Messenger, Signal and the like. The board is for products and profiles.
No adult content.

What you're actually buying

Clicks, and a public position. Nothing else.
Every outbound link is marked rel="sponsored", so a rank passes no ranking signal to your site. Anyone selling you paid placement as an SEO backlink is either wrong or lying.
Each row shows its cost per click, computed from the bid and the clicks it has delivered. Judge the price against that number.
Each week's final standings are archived at a permanent URL. Holding a rank for a week stays true after you stop paying.
Every sponsored slot publishes its result. Clicks and cost per click are on the row while it runs and in the weekly archive after it ends — including the weeks where a slot underperformed.

How the Arena works

Arena rank is net sales for the current week. Refunds and disputes subtract from the week they happen in.
Nothing in the Arena can be bought. There is no boost, no featured row, and no sponsorship inside it — no amount of money moves a position by one place.
“Verified” means read from the payment provider by us, through a read-only key you can revoke at any time. Numbers you type, upload, or screenshot are never shown as verified.
Makers are grouped into leagues by size, plus a rookie board for products under 90 days old, so a small product competes against small products.
You choose whether your revenue shows as an exact figure or a band. Band is the default. Customer names, emails, and individual charges are never public in either mode.
The round closes Monday 00:00 UTC and the standings are frozen into the archive, the same way sponsored weeks already are.

Keeping the Arena honest

Live payments only. Test-mode credentials are rejected.
Sales count net of refunds and disputes. A product refunding more than 40% of a round is flagged for review.
Buying from yourself doesn't count. Charges from an email domain matching the product or the maker, and repeated charges from the same customer, are flagged and excluded from rank until reviewed — never deleted.
A week more than 10× a product's own trailing average, with less than four weeks of history, goes to review before it ranks.
A product's first top-3 placement in any league is reviewed before it stands. It shows an “under review” badge meanwhile and auto-approves after 48 hours if nothing is flagged.
A product must be connected for at least three days before it can appear in a league top 10.
No gambling, adult content, peptides or pharma, or crypto tokens. Suspension removes a product from every board.
Product ownership is verified by a DNS record or a meta tag before the verified badge appears.
Suspensions are logged and the archive shows which rule was broken. Nothing is quietly deleted — a board that edits its own history is not an archive.

Removal

Listings that break these rules are removed and refunded for the unused portion of the week.
We don't edit descriptions to make a listing sound better, and we don't reorder the board for any reason other than the bids.