Public contract

Product Outbid rules

These rules describe what a payment changes, what it never grants, and how the public boards stay deterministic and auditable.

1. Ranking and amounts

A first activation uses whole US dollars and is at least $10. Every community boost is at least $5 and uses exact $5 increments.
All-time global and category placement use one shared net bid balance. Higher balances rank first; exact ties use the earlier committed balance time, then product ID.
Rank previews are estimates. Boost checkout accepts direct $5 increments and the server recalculates placement from the latest committed balance.
A quote is an estimate, never a reservation. The full verified payment is added exactly once to the latest committed balance before final ranks are recalculated.

Today is evaluated from server request time and rolls continuously; it is not a calendar-day or midnight reset.
Its score is the remaining valid credit from immutable bids paid inside the trailing 24 hours after verified refunds or disputes affecting those bids.
A payment aging out of Today does not create a ledger adjustment and never reduces the product's all-time bid balance.
Today ties use the earliest payment that still contributes positive window credit, then product ID. Products must be ACTIVE and have a positive Today score.

A new hostname passes safety moderation, may be paid and activated as Unverified, and can then be claimed through DNS TXT, HTML meta, or a well-known file.
An authenticated person may boost an eligible ACTIVE product without owning it. A boost never grants editing, category, claim, delisting, relisting, moderation, or refund-on-demand rights.
The billing email shown by Dodo is payment information only. It does not create a Product Outbid session and never proves website ownership.
Contributor identity is private. Public activity shows product and amount; owners receive only aggregate community support, while payers see their own receipts.

Only a verified successful Dodo webhook can activate a product or create bid credit. A browser success page cannot do so.
Every successfully charged dollar becomes bid credit; platform fees and taxes do not reduce the displayed amount.
A verified refund, dispute, chargeback, or reversal creates an immutable payer-specific adjustment. It never rewrites the original bid or another contributor's credit.
An invalid activation payment or coordinated abuse may suspend a product for review while preserving the complete payment and adjustment history.

Pornography, online gambling, malware, phishing, cloaked or shortened targets, affiliate-only links, unsupported profiles, and other prohibited destinations cannot check out or remain public.
Each product has one curated primary category. Category changes are reviewed and do not affect public placement until approval.
A verified owner may delist from every public ranking. New boosts close immediately; already-open provider-payable checkouts settle or expire before the product becomes hidden.
Delisting creates no automatic owner or contributor refund and preserves bid, adjustment, ownership, moderation, and click history. Relisting requires fresh safety and ownership checks without resetting tie state.

Every outbound placement is disclosed as paid and uses sponsored/nofollow link attributes. Product Outbid sells discovery and referral traffic, not dofollow backlinks or search-rank guarantees.
A successful outbound redirect appends exactly utm_source=productoutbid to the stored query-free product URL.
Public unique clicks count at most once per product for each signed browser identity. PostgreSQL is the exact ledger; the analytics cache is optional and rebuildable.
Consent-gated Google Analytics 4, cookie-free Ahrefs Web Analytics, and manual Ahrefs audits are optional production measurement tools only. They cannot determine rank, payment, ownership, moderation, or the exact outbound-click total and receive no payer or checkout identifiers from Product Outbid.