Terms of Service

Outbid is at outbid.awesomeindie.com. It is run by Awesome Indie, an independent project owned and operated by its founder, Diogo Capela. These terms are the agreement between you and us about Outbid, and placing a bid is how you accept them.

Outbid is a separate site from the directory at awesomeindie.com, with its own terms, which are these. If you also use the directory, its own Terms of Use cover that side, including accounts, submissions and free launches. Nothing you buy here changes anything there.

Outbid is a paid leaderboard. Every row on it is a placement somebody has paid for, and the order is decided by the amount paid and by nothing else. There is no editorial judgement in the ranking, no algorithm, no votes, and no way to earn a position without paying for it.

There are no accounts. You are not asked to sign in, register or create anything, and a bid is placed by pasting an address, naming a figure and paying.

You need to be old enough to enter a contract where you live, and at least 18. If you are bidding for a company, you are confirming you may bind it.

You may list an address you do not own. The board is a public directory of links, anyone can pay to point at anything that passes the checks in clause 04, and the person who paid is not thereby claiming to be the maker. If a listing points at something of yours and you would rather it did not, clause 10 says how to have it removed.

A product website. Anything a visitor can open and understand, however small, rough or unfinished. A page on somebody else's platform counts: a repository, an app store listing, a browser extension, a Gumroad product, a Notion site or an itch.io game are all products.

These are not allowed on the board:

• Group chats and invite links, including Telegram, WhatsApp, Discord, Messenger, Signal and Slack.
• Pornography, NSFW material, adult platforms, escort services and dating for money.
• Scams, phishing pages, fake stores, get-rich-quick and crypto-pump schemes, malware and pirated material.
• Illegal goods and services, and anything that exists to harass or defame somebody.
• Parked domains, for-sale pages, registrar holding pages, expired domains, dead links and empty pages.

Two things happen to every address before it is stored. Query parameters are stripped, so affiliate, referral and tracking links do not survive, and a short link is replaced by the address it points at. Platform links whose path is part of the identity, such as an app store or a repository, are keyed by that path, so two products on one platform never share a listing.

Every address is read by an AI before a checkout can open. It fetches the page, judges it against clause 04, and writes the row: the product name and the one line under it. The category is the one you picked in the form. If the answer is no, no checkout opens, nothing is charged, and the reason is shown to you in plain words.

The first paid bid on an address settles its card. After that the wording and the category stay as they are, so nobody can pay a dollar for the right to rewrite what a rival's listing says. If a category is wrong, email [email protected] and we will change it.

We can refuse a listing, and we can correct or shorten a description that is misleading, unreadable or not in English. We are not obliged to explain a refusal beyond the reason shown to you.

Bids are whole US dollars. A new listing starts at $5 and no bid can exceed $10,000, which is the ceiling our payment provider puts on a single pay-what-you-want charge.

• Taking the top spot costs at least $5 more than the highest bid standing. Paying less than that is fine, it simply puts you wherever your figure reaches.
• Equal bids keep the order they were placed in, so the older bid holds the higher rank.
• Bidding on an address already on the board raises that listing. The new total has to be at least $1 above what the listing stands at, and you pay only the difference.
• The band between matching the leader and clearing them by $5 buys nothing, so it is closed. Match the leader and take second, or clear the premium and take first.

Ranks are worked out live from the amounts standing, never stored, so the number beside a row is always the truth at the moment you look at it. A listing holds its place until somebody raises theirs past it, and there is no expiry: we are not selling a week or a month, we are selling a position.

The full rules, in the same words as the board enforces them, are on the rules page.

Payments run through Polar, which acts as merchant of record: Polar takes the payment, issues the receipt, handles the tax, and its own terms govern the transaction itself. We never see or hold your card details.

Outbid is sold as a pay-what-you-want product, which means the amount is editable on Polar's own page. The figure that decides your rank is the figure that actually clears, not the one the form asked for. Lower it at the checkout and you get the rank that lower figure reaches.

Every listing is marked nofollow sponsored, because that is exactly what a paid placement is. Clicks are sent to your address with your own query parameters removed and ?ref=awesomeindie.com added, so the traffic is visible in your own analytics.

You keep everything you own. By putting an address on the board you give us permission to show that address, the product name, the description, the category and the site's icon on Outbid, on the directory where we mention the board, and in the posts we make about the board on our own social accounts.

You confirm that listing it does not break somebody else's rights and does not break the law where you are. If a rights holder tells us otherwise, clause 10 applies.

Anybody can ask. Email [email protected] with the address and we will look at it. We take down a listing that points at something the owner does not want listed, that breaks clause 04, or that we are told in good faith infringes somebody's rights.

We can remove a listing at any time. If we remove one because it broke these terms, the money stays with us. If we remove one for any other reason, including at the request of the person the product belongs to, we refund what is standing on it. The Refund Policy says how that works.

The click figure on a row is a convenience, not a billing instrument. It is counted as your visitor leaves for the product, so an ad blocker, a lost connection or a browser that refuses the request undercounts it. Nothing you pay depends on it, and we do not promise it is exact.

Use the board as a person would. Do not automate the checks to spend our AI budget, do not manufacture clicks on your own row or anybody else's, do not try to work around a refusal by resubmitting the same page at a new address, and do not attack, scrape or overload the site.

We rate limit the address check, the checkout and the click counter by IP address. Hitting a limit is not a punishment, it is a queue, and it clears on its own.

Outbid runs on one server maintained by one person. We work to keep it up, and we can still take it down for maintenance, change how it looks, change what it costs, or stop taking new bids.

If we retire the board for good, we will say so on the site and refund what is standing on every live listing. A price change never applies backwards: a listing already up keeps the position its bid bought.

Every row on the board leads somewhere we do not control. The check in clause 05 is a gate, not an inspection, and a page can change the day after it passes. We are not responsible for what a listed site contains, sells, collects or does, and a listing is not a recommendation. The same goes for the services we depend on, each of which has its own terms.

Outbid is provided as it is. We do not promise it will be uninterrupted, that the board will bring you traffic, that traffic will bring you customers, or that any figure on the page is free of error. Where the law gives you rights that cannot be excluded, this clause does not touch them.

To the fullest extent the law allows, we are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, nor for lost profit, revenue, goodwill or expected traffic, arising out of Outbid.

Where we are liable, our total liability for all claims is capped at whatever you paid us in the twelve months before the claim. Bids here are small, and this cap is the honest size of the risk we can carry.

Nothing here excludes liability that cannot be excluded by law: death or personal injury caused by our negligence, fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, our own intent or gross negligence, or any consumer liability the law protects.

If somebody brings a claim against us because of an address you listed or a description you wrote, you will cover our reasonable costs of dealing with it, unless the claim comes from something we did ourselves.

We may update these terms. The date at the top of this page is always the current version, and a material change will be announced on the board before it takes effect. Carrying on bidding after that is how you accept the new version. Earlier versions are in the public git history of the site.

If you are a consumer resident in the EU, nothing here deprives you of the protection of your own country's mandatory consumer law, or of your right to bring proceedings where you live. Before anything goes near a court, please email [email protected]. Nearly everything is quicker to sort out that way.

If a clause here turns out to be unenforceable, the rest stands and that clause is read as narrowly as it needs to be to work. Not enforcing something straight away is not giving it up. You may not transfer your rights under these terms; we may transfer ours if the project changes hands.

These terms and the Privacy Policy are the whole agreement between us about Outbid. Nothing in them makes either of us the other's partner, employee or agent.

Anything about these terms, a takedown, a refusal or a refund: [email protected]. One person reads that address, so treat it as a message left rather than a line that is always staffed. Anything with a deadline attached is safer by email than anywhere else.