Terms of the founder race.

1Entering is free, and stays free

Founders pay nothing to enter, nothing to rank and nothing to be seen. There is no listing fee, no boost, no premium placement, and no way to turn money into points. This is not an introductory offer. If entry ever cost anything, the pot would stop being a sponsored prize and become a stake on an outcome, which is a different thing entirely.

2Voting is open from the first founder. The clock is not.

As soon as one founder is on the board, anybody eligible can vote for them, and that vote is kept. Votes cast during recruiting count in full and are neither reset nor counted a second time when the race starts.

What waits is the countdown and the prize. A race begins when 20 approved founders are in it. Until then there is no deadline, no winner and no payout, however long recruiting takes. The pot shown during recruiting is what is guaranteed once the race starts.

The moment the 20th founder is approved, a full seven-day countdown starts, once. The start time is recorded once and is not moved afterwards, and every vote already cast stands as it was.

3GitHub confirmation puts you on the board

The form at /enter saves your application privately. An established GitHub account then confirms it and publishes the founder immediately. One GitHub account can publish one founder. Accounts under 6 months old stay private for manual review.

Once confirmed, your name, your one-line description and your link are published. Your contact address is not, ever. We can remove an entry that is fraudulent, impersonates somebody, or breaks these terms.

4How the winner is decided

By counted votes. Not by a draw, not by a panel, and not by us. 3 points for someone who has never voted here before, 1 point for someone who has. One vote per person per season.

Anyone with a GitHub or X account at least 6 months old can vote, once per race. An account that has already voted cannot vote again by arriving through a different founder's link. A founder may vote, including for their own entry, on the same terms and for the same weight as anybody else.

Level points never overtake. If two founders finish on the same score, whoever entered the race first stays ahead.

5Winner takes all

The whole pot goes to one founder. It is not split and there are no runner-up prizes.

A race that does not reach its floor pays nobody. The entire pot rolls into the next race, so a quiet one makes the next bigger rather than smaller.

The floor for the current race is 250 €. A pot below it pays nobody and rolls forward in full. So does a race where nobody scored a point, or where no eligible founder remains.

6One person, one account, and what disqualification means

One person may not vote through multiple or fake accounts, and may not organise others to do it. Coordinated fake accounts, bought accounts, paid votes and automated voting all count as manipulation. Where we find it, the votes involved can be voided and the founder who benefited can be disqualified from the prize. We do not claim to detect every case automatically. What we do guarantee is that every removal is recorded with its reason, the entry stays visible on the board marked as removed, and the votes stay in the record marked as void, so any result can be checked afterwards.

Manufactured votes, bought accounts, or any other attempt to fake the number this whole thing exists to measure means removal from the race and forfeiting the prize. A removed entry cannot win whatever its score was. It stays visible on the board, marked as removed, and the votes it received stay recorded, marked as void. Nothing is deleted, because a result nobody can check afterwards is not a result.

We decide this, and we will say publicly what was found.

7The prize, and getting paid

The prize is money, in whole euros, paid by bank transfer to the winning founder after the race closes. We will ask for the details we need to send it, and for whatever a tax authority requires us to record.

After the prize is paid we ask the winner for a short, shareable note or clip about what it paid for. It is a request, not a condition: the money is transferred first and is never held back for it.

Open question, stated honestly: how prize money is treated for tax, and whether an invoice is required, has not been settled with an advisor yet. It does not change who wins or how much. It may change what paperwork the winner is asked for. This is written down rather than glossed over.

8If you are a sponsor paying for a listing

Anybody can buy a place: a company, or a private person with a side project. There is no minimum size, no company registration to show and no business account needed.

Listings on the board are paid. The price is worked out on our server from the state of the board at that moment and is shown to you before you pay. You pay on Stripe's page. Card details never reach this site.

A share of what sponsors pay funds the prize pot. The current share and where it goes are stated on the rules page and in the footer of every page, read live from the setting itself rather than written into the text.

9Refunds, cancellations and disputes

A listing is a digital service that begins immediately, and its whole value is the position it buys on a live board. Once a payment is confirmed the listing is on the board and the ranking has moved.

What we will do: if a payment was taken in error, taken twice, or never produced a listing, write to anton.mateo.berndt98@gmail.com and we will refund it in full. If we remove your listing for breaking the rules, we will refund the unused part.

Open question, stated honestly: whether a consumer right of withdrawal applies here, and how it interacts with a service that starts at once, has not been settled with a lawyer. Until it has, we will refund anybody who asks within fourteen days and explains why, rather than argue about it.

A chargeback removes the money and therefore removes the listing. If that money had already been counted into a pot that has been paid out, we absorb it. We do not claw anything back from a founder who has already won.

10If we have to stop

If a race cannot be completed, the pot rolls into the next one. If the site stops running altogether, any pot that has not been paid out will be paid to the leading eligible founder of the race that was running, and we will say so publicly.

We can change these terms for future races. A race that has already started runs under the terms it started with.

11Where you are

The site is operated from Germany and German law applies. Anyone can enter from anywhere, but taking part may have consequences under your own country's law, particularly around tax on a prize, and that is yours to check. If a court decides one part of these terms does not hold, the rest still does.