Rules.

What a bid costs

• Whole US dollars, in $1 steps. No cents.
• Minimum $5, maximum $999,999 in total.
• A single payment is capped at $2,000. This doesn't cap your rank — raising only ever charges the difference, so you climb past it in steps.
• Taking #1 costs at least $5 more than the current top total. Pay less and you simply land wherever that amount ranks.
• Equal totals: whoever got there first keeps the higher rank. Time breaks every tie.
• The price can move while you're paying. This is an auction, and checkout takes a few seconds. If someone else's payment lands first, yours is placed at whatever rank it genuinely supports rather than the one you were quoted — and we tell you so on the spot. Your money still counts in full toward your all-time total, and topping up to #1 from there only costs the difference.

Raising your own listing

• Raising costs only the difference above your current total — minimum $1. Climbing is cheap on purpose.
• Nobody else can take your rank by paying that difference. To pass you they have to beat your full total.
• Raising is tied to the browser that first paid for the listing. Clear your cookies and you lose the discount, not the listing.

The Today board

• Every payment counts toward Today for 24 hours from the moment it is made, then drops off.
• Payments that age out of Today still count toward your all-time total. Nothing is ever taken away from all-time.
• So Today's #1 is the most anyone has spent in a single rolling 24-hour window — a separate, faster race.

What counts as one listing

• A listing is keyed by its destination. example.com, www.example.com and https://example.com/?ref=x are all the same listing.
• Query strings are stripped, so affiliate and tracking parameters can't be used to split or disguise a listing.
• Store and repo links are keyed by path, so two apps in the same store — or two repos from the same owner — never share a bid.
• Link shorteners are resolved to their real destination. If we can't resolve one, it's refused.
• An @handle and its x.com profile URL are the same listing.

Clicks

• Outbound links carry ?utm_source=topbidai so you can see the traffic in your own analytics.
• Repeat clicks from the same visitor inside 30 minutes count once. We store a salted hash of the IP to do this, never the address itself.
• Whoever paid for a listing sees its full click breakdown on its page — daily counts, referrers and countries.

What we will remove

• Adult content, gambling, malware, scams, chat or invite links, and anything illegal where we operate.
• Listings whose destination doesn't show valid company or operator details.
• Anything impersonating another business.

Removal is at our discretion and does not come with a refund. See terms for the full list.

Money

• Payments are handled by our merchant of record. We never see your card.
• All sales are final. A rank is delivered the moment payment confirms, so there is nothing to return — being outranked later is the product working, not a fault.
• The exception: if we take your money and no listing appears, that is our problem, not yours. Email us with the receipt and we will place it by hand or refund it. You will never be asked to pay twice for the same bid.
• No account, no subscription, no renewal. You pay once, per bid.