Two ways up. Same ladder.
Every app on the board holds an amount. Highest amount is #1. You can pay to add to yours, or you can get tapped and earn it. Nothing else moves an app.
Buy your way up
What you pay is what you add. Pay $50 and your app goes up by $50. Whole dollars, no maximum, no account — checkout takes an email and nothing else.
It lands the moment payment clears. Paying less than the top price still puts you on the board, at whatever rank it buys.
Card details go to Stripe and never to us. We never see them and never store them.
Get tapped up
Anyone can tap for any app, free, with no sign-in. Tapping earns real value — but slowly, and only with people behind you.
Each hour has a pool. Taps fill it, and whatever is in it at the top of the hour is split between the apps that earned it.
What a tap is actually worth
A tap is worth a fraction of a penny, and it goes into a shared pool rather than straight to the app. A tap from a device we can verify adds 1¢; one we cannot verify adds 0.4¢. You never have to do anything for this — see Why some taps count less below.
The pool tops out at $20 an hour. Past that, extra taps stop adding to it.
Try it with real numbers
Say 21 taps went to other apps this hour, and your app got:
- 1Taps this hour131 taps in total — 110 yours, 21 theirs
- 2Turned into a pool131 × 0.4¢ = $0.52 in the pool
- 3Split by shareYou had 84% of the taps, so you take 84% of the pool
- 4You win$0.44 added to your app at the top of the hour
Below the ceiling this always works out to your own taps back: 110 taps × 0.4¢ = $0.44. The share maths only starts to bite once the pool is full.
The limits
No app takes more than $5 from one hour, however hard it is tapped. Ten million fake taps and one genuinely popular app hit exactly the same number.
An hour nobody tapped in releases nothing. The pool is not handed out on a timer — it has to be filled first.
What you hold is permanent. Nobody can take it off you; they can only get more than you.
We are not claiming this cannot be gamed
It can. Anyone determined enough can fake taps. What we are claiming is that faking them is capped at a known amount — $120 a day, absolute maximum — and that this is small enough not to be worth the trouble.
We could stop it properly by making everyone sign in and prove who they are. We would rather not, so we bounded the damage instead. That is an honest description of every board like this one; most simply do not say so.
Why some taps count less
Some devices can quietly confirm to us that they are real devices, without you doing anything or seeing anything — no puzzle, no checkbox, nothing to opt into. Those taps count in full. Where that signal is missing, taps count 40%.
This is not a judgement about you. It is available on recent Apple devices and patchy elsewhere, so if your taps are being discounted it is almost certainly your browser rather than anything you did.
What you can list
- App Store and Play Store links only. Nothing else is accepted.
- The name, icon, publisher and rating come from the store, not from whoever submitted the link. You cannot upload an image or rename an app.
- The only text you control is one line, and we moderate those.
- Apps rated 17+ or Mature are not accepted.
- Two links to the same app are one listing. Tracking parameters are stripped.
- Anyone can list any app. If someone lists yours and you would rather they had not, use the this is mine link on the listing and we will take it down.
Clicking through
Tapping an app’s name opens its store page. If it is on both stores we send you to whichever matches your device. Those click-throughs are the reason to be on the board at all, and every listing shows its count.
Sponsors
The strip above the board is advertising. It is labelled, it sits outside the board, and it does not affect anyone’s rank. The only thing money can do to the ladder is add to an app’s amount, at a published price anyone can pay.
Slots are sold by the year, one payment, and the price rises by a fixed step with every slot ever sold. It never falls — letting a slot lapse and coming back later will never be cheaper than staying.
Changes and removals
The pool size, the ceiling and the price are all things we can adjust. If we change one we will say so here with the date, and we will never revalue what you already hold.
We will remove a listing that is not a real app, that resolves to something other than it claims, or whose one-liner we would not want on the front page. If we remove a listing for a reason that is not the buyer’s fault, we refund what was paid.
Anything here unclear or wrong? That is a bug — tell us.
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