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Bounties are NOT live yet — this page publishes the mechanics for review first
How bounties will work
When bounties launch, these are the exact money mechanics — published now, before the feature exists, because a money feature you can't inspect in advance is a money feature you shouldn't trust. This page is a hard launch gate: bounties cannot be switched on until it is linked from every bounty surface.
1Your card is only charged when the build ships
A bounty is created as an authorization with manual capture — the money never moves at pledge time. It is captured only when the claimed build actually ships and the release conditions are met. Until then it's a hold, not a payment.
2Deadline passes, nothing ships? Nothing is charged
Every bounty has a hard deadline. If the build doesn't ship by then, the authorization is voided automatically. There is no refund step, because legally the money never left your card.
3WantBorn never holds bounty money — ever
Funds move via Stripe Connect destination charges: from the sponsor to the builder's own Stripe account, held in Stripe's custody throughout. Bountysource went insolvent holding bounty funds in its own balance — builders lost thousands. That failure mode is structurally impossible here, and keeping it impossible is a binding platform rule, not a policy we might revisit.
4The platform fee is fixed and disclosed: 10%
WantBorn's cut is an application fee on the destination charge — 10% by default, shown on every bounty before you fund it. It is taken only when a bounty is actually released, never from a voided one.
5Bounties only exist on claimed quests
You can only fund a bounty once a builder has claimed the gap — otherwise there is nobody to pay, and an unclaimed cash pot is exactly the loosely-held-funds pattern we refuse to create.
6No fake bounties, no marketing numbers
A bounty amount shown anywhere on WantBorn is an authorized, capturable Stripe hold — never an estimate, never a pledge of intent dressed up as money. If the founder seeds a bounty personally, it goes through the identical flow and is labeled “Founder-funded,” never faked as a platform reserve.
Why publish this before the feature?
Because the failures in this category were mechanics failures: platforms holding funds they shouldn't, charging at times users didn't expect, showing numbers that weren't real money. Deciding the mechanics calmly — and in public — is the fix. If you spot a hole in these rules, tell us on the Forum before a single dollar moves.