A free half and a paid half

Submitting is free and there is no fee to stay listed. You write the page (name, tagline, category, pictures) and it goes live at once, entered into the edition that is open when you submit. Nothing waits in a review queue.

Every launch of the week stands in the Community Column, ranked by reader votes. Nothing in that column can be bought, and no bid appears in it.

Votes are checked, not simply counted: you cannot vote for your own app, a burst of votes from one account is refused, and a vote cast by an account less than a day old is taken out of the ranking when the edition closes. The count you see on the page stays raw; the gate applies only where the ranking decides something.

When the edition closes, the app with the most votes is named Reader's Choice and leads the next Community Column, unless it won one of the last four editions, in which case the next app in the ranking steps up. Listing an app enters it in that ranking and nothing more: no submission wins Reader's Choice, only the votes it collects. It is the one position on the site that money cannot reach, which is why it is not on the front page — the front page is sold end to end.

The Classifieds are a live auction board. Any approved app can bid for a position, and the edition opens at $1.00. The board is ordered by bid, highest first. Equal bids do not change places: the earliest bid keeps the position, so taking a place means actually outbidding it by at least $1.00.

Every bid is public and paid at checkout. Being outbid costs nothing further, but it returns nothing either. A bid is a purchase of position, not a deposit.

Raising your own bid pays only the difference over the bid you already stand at, so an edition costs you your highest bid and no more, however many times you had to raise it. Taking back a position you lost costs the gap, not a second full price.

Every edition opens a fresh auction at the floor, so the price of the front page cannot ratchet upward week after week, and a solo founder can always afford to open. A big bid is not erased when its week ends: last edition's winning ten keep printing on the front page through the current one, and the highest bids ever placed hold a permanent line on the classifieds until someone beats them.

The highest 10 positions are the paid board of the edition, and the highest bid of all leads the front page. Everything below them stays readable in the Classifieds, at the price each one paid.

The front page holds no free positions at all, so there is no line on it to single out: every place on the page was bought. The sponsored mark is for where the two halves meet, an archived edition, which prints the paid board and the community ranking on one page and labels every paid line.

At close the ranking freezes, the next edition's Reader's Choice is chosen from it, and the edition is filed in the archive. The weekly roll does that on a timer and never moves money; finalising what each board position earned happens only when an editor closes the edition by hand. Either way, the new edition opens with an empty board and the bidding starts again.