# Ladder

> An open public board for websites and projects. The bid decides the order; publication time breaks equal bids.

## About

Ladder is an 8StarLabs experiment for real public websites, products, launches, businesses, portfolios, newsletters, communities, and projects. Anyone can join if the destination is public and passes the safety rules. The board is intentionally open rather than a curated club.

## Ranking

- New bids are whole-dollar USD amounts from $5 to $999,999.
- Higher successfully paid bids rank first.
- Equal bids are ordered by earliest publication time.
- A different destination can climb above a listing with at least $1 more than its current bid.
- Entering the same domain again increases that listing only with a bid at least $5 above its current bid; checkout charges only the difference.
- A listing is public only after verified Stripe fulfillment.
- Full or partial refunds remove the associated listing from the public board.

## Listing data

The public form asks for a product domain and bid. Ladder resolves the website title, description, destination metadata, and favicon from the public site; there is no listing-image upload. Public listings may show outbound click totals, but not payer identity or billing data. There are no public category filters or tabs. The leaderboard shows up to 50 listings per page, with the page represented by the `page` URL parameter.

## Safety and eligibility

Ladder screens destinations and copy for vulgarity, hate or racism, harassment, sexual content, gambling, malware, phishing, scams, impersonation, illegal activity, misleading claims, link farms, and other unsafe or deceptive content. Ambiguous submissions may go to manual review.

## Payments and public payment activity

No Ladder account is required. Stripe-hosted Checkout collects billing details and payment information. Stripe webhooks, not the browser redirect, publish listings. The public payment-activity readout is based on completed Ladder Checkout Sessions, subtracts successful refunds, and never uses seeded or invented amounts. When explicitly configured, verified test and live Stripe activity may be combined and labeled clearly. It is not a net-profit statement and does not expose billing details.

## Pages and resources

- [Leaderboard](https://ladder.8starlabs.com/)
- [Rules](https://ladder.8starlabs.com/rules)
- [Sitemap](https://ladder.8starlabs.com/sitemap.xml)
- [Robots](https://ladder.8starlabs.com/robots.txt)
- [Full context](https://ladder.8starlabs.com/llms-full.txt)

## Ownership

Ladder is built and operated by [8StarLabs](https://8starlabs.com).