Terms & privacy
Last updated 4 September 2026.
1. The service
holdword is operated by Planetary Escape Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales (company number 15500916), 4th Floor, 18 St Cross Street, London EC1N 8UN. "We" and "us" in these terms means Planetary Escape Ltd.
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.
A tip is a voluntary payment that buys nothing: no word, no placement, no credit and no rank. Tips are final except where a refund is required by law.
If our payment provider flags a payment as fraudulent we refund it, reverse the placement it bought, and may suspend the account.
A chargeback or payment dispute raised without a legal basis is a breach of these terms; we may reverse the placement, remove the word and refuse future use of the service.
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.
Removal for a Rules violation forfeits your lifetime total on that word.
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.
You can also buy site credit in advance. Credit is applied to your next payment, cannot be transferred, withdrawn or exchanged for cash, and is not refunded except where the law requires it. If a credit purchase is reversed by the card issuer, the credit is removed and the account may be suspended.
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@holdword.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
The data controller is Planetary Escape Ltd (company number 15500916), 4th Floor, 18 St Cross Street, London EC1N 8UN, United Kingdom. Privacy questions: privacy@holdword.com.
We collect information needed to operate the service, including your account identifier, email address, claims, destinations, payment records and account activity.
Our lawful bases under UK GDPR: performance of a contract (providing placements, processing payments, sending outbid and removal notices); legitimate interests (preventing fraud and abuse, keeping the list clean, and understanding how the service is used through cookieless analytics); and legal obligation (keeping financial records).
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), email (Resend), automated content review of words and links (OpenRouter) and link safety checks (Google Web Risk). These providers process information on our behalf as necessary to provide their services.
Payment, refund and dispute records are kept for six years to meet UK accounting rules. Claims and destinations stay while your account exists; reports and moderation records are kept for two years. If you ask us to delete your account we remove the rest within 30 days unless we need it for an open dispute.
Where applicable, you may have rights relating to your personal data, including access, correction, deletion, restriction, portability and objection. Contact privacy@holdword.com to exercise them. UK users may also complain to the Information Commissioner's Office.
10. Contact
Support: support@holdword.com
Privacy: privacy@holdword.com
Rights and takedowns: contact@holdword.com