The cheapest place on this board costs a fixed amount, published on every page. Anything at or above it puts you on the board. Where on the board depends on what the listings above you have paid, and those amounts are printed beside them, so the cost of any position you might want is arithmetic you can do before you decide anything.
There is no rate card, no minimum term, no monthly commitment and no negotiation, because there is nobody to negotiate with.
One floor for everybody
The entry price does not change because other listings joined.
That sounds obvious and it was not always how this worked. For one day the floor was one step past whoever was currently last, which meant the cost of joining depended on what strangers in unrelated categories happened to be paying. It was a number nobody could predict and nobody had agreed to. An empty place at the bottom of the board is worth the floor whatever the listing above it paid, and that is how it works now.
What the payment buys
A position, permanently, at what you paid. Not a month of it.
- It does not expire. There is no renewal date and no invoice next year.
- It can be raised. Adding to what a listing holds costs only the
difference, and a raise has to add at least a tenth of the current total, so moving up is a decision rather than a keystroke.
- It cannot be taken. Money moves a rank and nothing else does, including
us. That is what makes the rest of the rules enforceable rather than a promise.
- A rank already paid for keeps what it bought, under the rules current when
it settled, whatever the changelog says later.
Why the price is printed at all
Because a price you have to ask for is a price that varies by who is asking.
Every directory that sells placement and does not publish the number is charging different people different amounts for the same row, and the people paying most are the ones with the least information. Printing it costs us the ability to charge a large buyer more. What it buys is that nobody has to wonder whether they were quoted the friendly number.
It also means the board cannot quietly become expensive. If the floor moves, the change is in the changelog with its reason, and anybody who already paid keeps what they bought.
What the money is spent on
Published, itemised, on the stats page: the domain, the server, the disk that holds the Monero blockchain, the mail, the edge in front of the clearnet site. Each with what a year costs and the date it is paid up to, and where there is somewhere to check the date without asking us, that link is there.
The rule for what happens to income is one sentence: every year of running costs that comes in buys another year, first. A quarter of everything taken goes back into finding readers, which is a share rather than a figure so it can be checked against a total this board already publishes. Everything past that is the operator's income, and that is said plainly rather than dressed up as reinvestment.
What it is not
It is not a fee for consideration. There is no queue, no application and no review, so there is nothing to consider. The one payment on this board that buys a decision rather than a rank is a category proposal, and even that lands your listing on the board whichever way the decision goes.
It is also not a promise of traffic. The board publishes what it actually sends, daily, including the small numbers. Multiply that by the clicks a row is getting and decide for yourself what a position is worth. That arithmetic is the whole pitch.