Updated 23 September 2026

Rules

Plinth is a public market for position. A company pays a stake. The stake is the rank. Visitors can see the number, the clicks, and the ledger. Nothing else reorders the board.

What you are buying

A stake buys placement, a public profile, and a counted trail of impressions, profile views, and outbound clicks. It does not buy an endorsement, a customer, or a promise that the clicks will convert. Cost per click on a profile is stake divided by outbound clicks. That ratio can be ugly. It is published anyway.

• A market stake also stands on your category, your stage, your geography, and a second category if you set one.
• A week stake stands on this week and on your category's week. It does not raise the lifetime market stake.
• A month stake works the same way for the UTC month.
• Hot Zone, a featured launch, a category presentation, and the analytics pass are labeled products. They never change rank.

How rank is decided

On a stake board, the higher stake is ahead. If two stakes are equal, the one that reached that amount earlier stays ahead. Trending is not a stake board: it orders market stake added in the last 24 hours. Launches lists companies with a launch date in the last 30 days, ordered by market stake. The featured rail above launches is paid and separate.

Amounts

• New market listings start at $25. Week and month entries start at $20. Raises are at least $10. The ceiling is $999,999.
• Stakes are whole dollars.
• To pass a rival you must exceed their stake by a percentage of it: 8% under $200, 5% under $2,000, 3% under $20,000, and 2% from there, never less than $10, rounded up to the next dollar.
• Paying less than the lead still publishes you at the rank that amount can hold.
• Raising the same listing charges only the difference. Another account cannot take your rank by paying that difference unless their new total clears the passing rule.

The floor exists because a card fee of 2.9% + $0.30 consumes about a third of a $1 charge. The economics page shows the arithmetic.

When you are passed

Your stake stays. Your rank falls to wherever that stake now sits. If you were inside the top 25 of that board, Plinth writes a notice with the amount required to move back in front of the company that passed you. There is no refund for being passed, and no penalty beyond the lower rank. Defend it or don't.

Seasons

This week opens Monday 00:00 UTC and clears the next Monday. This month clears when the UTC month changes. Past stakes remain in the ledger. They no longer rank. Lifetime market rank is untouched by a season ending.

Money

• You pay the ticket. Processing is not added at checkout.
• Cards are processed by Stripe when a live key is configured. This deployment shows a sandbox banner when it is not, and confirms stakes without a charge.
• Fifteen percent of net stake receipts — market, week, and month — is reserved to buy audience for the boards. Tools and sponsorships are not part of that reserve.
• A cleared stake is not refundable. A payment that never clears is not a stake. A Hot Zone or category presentation that sells out before your payment clears is voided and, on Stripe, refunded.
• Chargebacks remove the listing. The account can be closed.

Read the refund page before you pay. It is the whole policy, not a summary with a trapdoor.

What can be listed

• A product site or a company profile. One listing per destination. The host is the key, except on platforms such as GitHub, X, LinkedIn, and the app stores, which are keyed by path.
• Tracking parameters are stripped. Shorteners, affiliate redirects, and chat invites are rejected.
• Sexual content, scam listings, and impersonation are removed.
• The domain on a listing does not change after it exists. Selling a rank by swapping the URL is not available.

Verification and review

Add a DNS TXT record, plinth-verify=…, on the listing host. Verification is free. Without it, a stake above $500, or more than $1,000 in a day, waits for review and is not captured until it is approved. Verified stakes above $25,000 also wait. Disposable email, a burst of payment attempts, and one account passing its own other listing are blocked. Write to hello@plinth.world if a review looks wrong. An admin can remove a listing, reject a held stake, or verify a domain by hand. Those actions are written to an audit log.

Notices and sharing

A cleared stake writes a public line on the activity tape and a card you can copy to X, LinkedIn, or Instagram. The card states the rank, the board, and the stake. It is an advertisement you chose to make. It is not a prize.