Questions, answered straight.

A place on the public board, immediately. $1 is the whole-dollar minimum bid, no cents, and it becomes your starting effective balance the moment Stripe confirms the payment. You also get a profile page, a public click count, and an outbound link to your site. It does not buy a fixed rank: where you land depends on what everyone else currently holds, because rank is one global, live number, not a price tier.

No. Payment is the only gate. The moment Stripe confirms your $1, our webhook creates your listing live, on the board, in the directory, in the sitemap, immediately. Nobody reviews it first and nothing sits in a queue. We do reserve the right to remove a listing afterward if it breaks the terms, impersonation, malware, a business you weren't authorised to list, but that's a check after the fact, never a delay before you're visible.

There are no passwords. Go to the sign-in page, enter the email you used at checkout, and we email a link that's valid for 15 minutes and works once. Sign-in only works for an email that already has a listing, if you haven't listed yet, list first and your account is created from the email you pay with.

By one number: your effective balance, the sum of every bid you've made, each one still worth whatever decay has left of it. Highest number ranks first. No algorithm, no manual curation, no reviews. Category and country filters don't create a separate ranking, they filter the one global list. Full mechanics on the rules page.

Every bid loses 2% of whatever's left of it, every day, from the moment it's placed, forever. It compounds, so it's steepest early and gentler later, and it approaches zero without ever quite reaching it. It exists so the board can't be bought once and abandoned: holding a position costs something every day, which is what keeps the top contested instead of frozen after the first week.

Your balance keeps decaying at 2% a day and your rank falls as whoever's still paying passes you. It never goes negative and you'll never owe anything, it just gets small enough to stop mattering. Your listing itself is unaffected, see "do I get removed" below.

The effective balance of whoever's directly above you, plus a flat $5, rounded up to the next whole dollar. The $5 exists so a payment actually passes them instead of tying, ties are decided by age, not money.

No. Payments are non-refundable. A payment buys a position on a live directory the instant it's processed, and that position is inherently temporary by design: another business can outrank you at any time, and your own balance decays daily. Both are the product working correctly, not a fault. This isn't something you learn after paying either: the page you pay from links directly to the non-refundable and decay terms, and topping up an existing listing requires checking a box stating both facts before the payment button unlocks. The one exception is a technical failure on our side that keeps a payment off the board, email us and we'll fix the position or refund that specific payment. Full policy in the terms.

Whichever listed earlier keeps the higher rank. It's decided by how long you've been on the board, not by which bid landed first. Matching whoever's above you is never enough to pass them, that's exactly what the $5 overtake premium is for.

Within seconds. Stripe confirms the payment, our webhook writes the bid (the only place a bid is ever created), and the board reflects it on the next read, cached for a few seconds at the edge so a burst of traffic doesn't hit the database on every request. Decay and rank are both computed live at read time, there's no nightly batch job to wait for.

No. Decay only ever costs you position, never your listing. Your directory entry and your profile page stay up regardless of how far your balance has decayed, you just sink toward the bottom of the board. The only things that take a listing down are pausing it yourself or a violation of the terms.

No. Gambling means a prize is awarded by chance to one winner while everyone else who paid gets nothing. None of that is present here. There's no draw, no random outcome, no countdown timer, and no hidden number, the exact price of every position is calculated from a published formula and shown before you pay. There's no losing side either: every business that pays is listed and stays listed. What you buy is a specific amount of ranking balance, credited to your own listing in full the instant you pay it. That's a purchase, not a bet.

Not in the way that matters. In an auction, the highest bidder gets the item and everyone else who bid walks away with nothing. Here, everyone who pays gets exactly what they paid for: a listing and a position calculated from the amount paid, credited in full, immediately, with no separate fee that doesn't count toward your own rank. It's closer to renting advertising space by the day, a billboard or a paid search placement, where you buy a position, it runs for a while, and you renew if you want to keep it.

That can happen, and it isn't a malfunction. Rank is live: if another business pays more than you in the seconds after your payment clears, they'll show above you the next time the board refreshes, at most a few seconds later. Nothing is lost when that happens. Your payment still counts in full toward your effective balance, decaying at the same 2% a day as everyone else's, for as long as it exists. You didn't buy a guaranteed rank, you bought a specific amount of ranking weight, worth exactly what it's worth against whatever everyone else currently holds.

The same rule that applies to everyone else: a listing can only be created by our Stripe webhook, and only after Stripe confirms a real charge. There's no internal tool, admin panel, or database shortcut that inserts a listing without a matching payment, the webhook is deliberately the only path in the codebase that can create one. If we wanted to inflate the board, we'd have to actually pay real money to do it, and it would show up as a real, named listing with a real link, exactly like anyone else's, not a hidden thumb on the scale.

Your listing stays exactly as listed, and decay keeps running exactly the same regardless of clicks. We don't guarantee any level of traffic, clicks, or leads, and your click count is public precisely so you can judge for yourself whether a position was worth what it cost. If a rank isn't earning attention, the honest move is to let it decay and hold a cheaper spot, not to keep paying for a number nobody sees.

Depends what you're buying. Clutch and DesignRush sell placement through review counts, categories, and sales calls, and their own rankings are shaped by relationships and packages whose price you can't fully see. Here the entire mechanism is one public number: whoever paid the most is #1, and you can check exactly what it would cost to pass them. It won't do anything those directories can't, an outbound link and a listing page, but it's the one that shows its own math. See why rank here below for the fuller case.

There's no fund set aside to refund a decaying balance if the Service closes, the same way there wouldn't be for an ad campaign on a platform that shut down mid-flight. Payments are non-refundable for the reasons in the terms, and that doesn't change if the Service stops running. We'd try to give notice if that ever happened, but we don't promise a wind-down period or a payout, and you shouldn't hold a balance here expecting it to be redeemable for anything beyond the listing it's currently paying for.

No. We collect the email you list with, the business details you submit, and a hashed IP for click counting and fraud prevention, and we use them to run the Service: sign-in links, dashboard access, and the alert emails you opt into. We don't sell any of it to third parties. Full detail on what's collected and why is in the privacy policy.

Because payment is the entire mechanism, not a paywall in front of one. Rank is purely what's been paid, a free tier would mean some listings compete on money and others compete on nothing, which isn't a ranking anymore. The $1 minimum also does real work as a spam filter: a listing costs something to create, so putting a link on the board isn't free the way a comment box is.

No. Every outbound link on a listing carries rel="noopener sponsored nofollow". That's deliberate: a paid link that passes ranking credit to its destination violates Google's link spam policy, and getting caught doing that risks the whole domain, everyone's listing, not just yours. sponsored also discloses honestly that the link is a paid placement, and it's also why we can't promise this improves your own site's Google ranking, see "why rank here" below for what it does do.

Yes. Every outbound click carries utm_source=agencyladder, utm_medium=referral, a campaign tag, and utm_content=rank-NN naming the exact rank you were holding when the click happened. Open GA4, Plausible or Fathom and it shows up as a named, attributable campaign broken down by rank, not folded into "direct" or an unlabelled referral.

Sign in at the sign-in page with the same email you paid with, no password, we email you a link. That reaches your dashboard. Self-serve editing and pausing are still rolling out; until that ships, email [email protected] and we'll pause, edit, or remove your listing by hand. Pausing takes a listing off the board immediately without deleting it. If you want your data actually deleted rather than paused, that's a separate request, see the privacy policy.

Yes, entirely. Rank is advertising, decided by money and nothing else. We don't vet, evaluate or endorse any listing, appearing at #1 means that business paid the most, and nothing else. That disclosure isn't buried: it's rule 2 of five, it's a live dollar figure on every card, and it's stated again in the terms.

OnDutyOps LLC operates AgencyLadder. For corrections, removal requests, data requests, or a question this page didn't answer, email [email protected].