How this works

The ladder

Bids are whole US dollars. The step grows with the amount, so the bottom of the board stays cheap and the top gets expensive. Overtaking a $20 listing costs $22, not $21.

The daily drop is exactly one ladder step. A day of silence costs you precisely what it costs someone else to pass you.

Your bid drops every day

• There is no board reset. Instead every bid bleeds, continuously, at the rate in the table above.
• The drop is calculated from the clock, not applied by a job — so it is always exactly right, and the board at any past instant can be reconstructed.
• At $0 a listing fades: it drops out of the ranking into the faded section and can be revived by any bid of $1 or more.
• Total raised is never decayed. Weekly and all-time stats stay honest.

Top-ups only cost the difference

Your listing sits at $2 and you want $6 — you pay $4. Submit the same link again with a higher target. Your timestamp refreshes, which costs you your tie-break seniority, so ties go to whoever got there first.

Links are matched on a normalised key: query strings, fragments, www., trailing slashes and casing are all stripped, so example.com/?ref=x and example.com are one listing. Because there are no accounts, anyone can top up any listing. That is intentional.

What gets posted

• Four cycles a day, IST: 00:00 · 06:00 · 12:00 · 18:00.
• At each boundary the board freezes. The overall #1 gets a solo post. Every category #1 is named in a roundup post.
• That is 8 posts a day, fixed — whether five categories are live or all 28. The promise scales with the board, not with anyone’s free time.
• A bid placed one second after a boundary belongs to the next cycle. Winners are frozen and never recomputed.
• If a post cannot go out in its cycle, it rolls to the next one.

What you can list

• Your product or company site, your X profile, or a specific post.
• Not allowed: link shorteners, chat and invite links, adult content, malware, phishing, impersonation, anything illegal. Removed with no refund.
• Platform links — GitHub, App Store, Play Store, npm — match on their exact path, so two repos never share a slot.
• Query parameters are stripped, so affiliate and referral links will not work.
• Clicks are deduplicated per person per hour. Click farming voids eligibility.

Refunds

• Bids are final. Once a bid is on the board it is not refundable.
• If we refuse to post your content, the listing is removed and the bid is refunded in full. Our call, our reputation.
• If a post you won is missed for three cycles running, that winning bid is refunded on request.
• Duplicate charges from a payment retry are refunded automatically.
• Chargebacks remove the listing and block the identity from bidding again.

Disclosure

Listings we own are labelled house. Paid placements are labelled Sponsored and never mix into the ranking. Neither ever gets a promotion slot.