Terms & privacy
Working draft. Controller identity, lawful bases and processor list to be completed before launch.
1. The service
holdword sells temporary promotional placement on its ranked word list. A payment contributes to your lifetime total for a word. If your total is the highest qualifying total, that word links to your chosen destination.
Placement begins as soon as your payment is confirmed and the claim is accepted. There is no minimum placement period. Another user may outbid you at any time, including immediately after your placement begins.
Being outbid is an inherent part of the service and does not by itself entitle you to a refund.
2. Payments and refunds
Payments are final except where a refund is required by law or expressly provided by these terms.
Being outbid, or having a placement removed because it violates our rules, is not a refund event.
By purchasing a placement, you request that we begin providing the service immediately.
3. No payouts or ownership
There are no payouts, prizes, winnings or cash value. Payments are payments for promotional placement, not deposits, wagers or investments.
A placement gives you no ownership of, or legal rights in, the word itself.
4. Words and links
The Rules form part of these terms.
Words and destinations may be automatically reviewed before publication and may be reviewed again afterwards. We may reject, suspend or remove content that violates the Rules or where reasonably necessary for legal, safety or operational reasons.
Changing a destination triggers a new review.
5. Outbidding and cumulative payments
Your lifetime payments toward a word count toward future attempts to hold that word.
To take a held word, your new lifetime total must exceed the current holder's total by the required minimum increment shown before payment.
Previous payments are not returned when you lose a word.
6. Simultaneous claims
Placement changes only after payment has been confirmed.
If another qualifying payment is confirmed before yours and your resulting total is no longer sufficient to take the word, the payment is added to your account as site credit rather than changing the placement.
Site credit can be used toward another word or a later attempt to reclaim the same word. It has no cash value except where a refund is required by law.
7. No affiliation
Words are strings used to identify advertising placements. Holding a word does not imply endorsement by, affiliation with, or ownership of any corresponding person, company, product or trademark.
Links are marked rel="sponsored nofollow".
Rights holders can report disputed placements to contact@example.com.
8. Accounts
You are responsible for activity performed through your account and for keeping your account access secure.
We may suspend accounts used for fraud, abuse, payment disputes or repeated violations of the Rules.
9. Privacy
We collect information needed to operate the service, including your account identifier, email address, claims, destinations, payment records and account activity.
We use this information to provide and administer placements, calculate cumulative payments, process transactions, prevent abuse, provide customer support and send transactional messages such as outbid notifications.
We collect usage analytics to understand how the service is used. Analytics run without cookies or persistent identifiers for signed-out visitors.
We use service providers for authentication (Clerk), payments (Stripe), hosting and database (Vercel, Convex), analytics (PostHog, EU region) and email (Resend). These providers process information on our behalf as necessary to provide their services.
We retain information for as long as reasonably necessary to operate the service, maintain financial and fraud-prevention records, comply with legal obligations and resolve disputes.
Where applicable, you may have rights relating to your personal data, including access, correction, deletion, restriction, portability and objection. Contact privacy@example.com to exercise them. UK users may also complain to the Information Commissioner's Office.
10. Contact
Support: support@example.com
Privacy: privacy@example.com
Rights and takedowns: contact@example.com