Terms

You are buying a listing. When you pay, StartupWorld places a permanent pin at coordinates you choose and renders it on the globe. The listing carries a display name, one line of text up to 140 characters, and one outbound link. It shows your position in three scopes — your city, your country, and the world — and it counts the clicks your link receives so you can see whether it is doing anything.

That is the whole product. You are not buying land, property, a right of any kind over a real place, a share in anything, a token, or a claim against StartupWorld. The pin exists on this website and nowhere else.

The minimum is $5. You can pay more, and you can pay again later to move up; your rank is your cumulative total, never your last payment. Payments are handled by Stripe. No card details ever reach our servers.

Payments are not refundable. The listing is created the moment your payment clears, and from then on it is doing exactly what it was sold to do. Changing your mind, being outranked by somebody else, or deciding the link is not sending you enough traffic are not grounds for a refund, and we will say so if you ask.

Two things we will always fix: if you were charged twice for the same purchase, or if you paid and no listing appeared, email us and we will refund or repair it. Those are our mistakes, not changes of mind.

Your name, your line and your link are public the second they are live, on a page anyone can find. Keep them to things you would be comfortable seeing on a billboard.

Not allowed, and this list is not exhaustive:

• Slurs, hate speech, or harassment of a person or a group.
• Sexual content, or links to it.
• Malware, phishing, deceptive redirects, or anything pretending to be a person or organisation it is not.
• Scams — including the entire family of “send crypto, receive more crypto”.
• Anything illegal where we operate, or anything that would put our payment processing at risk.

Links must be https. New and edited listings are screened automatically. A listing that trips the filter is held: the row and the money stay exactly where they are, the rank is untouched, and the pin simply does not render until a human has looked at it.

We can remove any listing, at any time, for abuse. Removal means the pin stops rendering and the page stops resolving. It does not come with a refund. We will tell you why if you ask, and if we got it wrong we will put it back.

There are three boards: richest by total stake, most planted by number of distinct plots, and rising by movement over the last 24 hours. Positions are computed from the payments recorded in our database and update continuously.

There is no prize and no payout of any kind. Nothing is won. Reaching #1 in your city, your country, or the world entitles you to be shown at #1 and to nothing else — no money, no goods, no share of anything anybody else paid. There is no pot. Money paid to us is ours, and it is never redistributed to other users under any condition.

Ranks do not decay, and there is no subscription or fee to hold a position. If you are passed, it is because somebody paid more, and you can pay the difference to pass them back.

Every listing gets one outbound link. Below $25 of cumulative stake the link carries nofollow. At or above it, the nofollow comes off. We state this openly because the alternative — quietly selling followed links — is the kind of thing that gets a site deindexed, which would help nobody here.

We count clicks on your link and show you the total, roughly where they came from, and when. We do not promise a number of clicks and never will. What we promise is that the number you see is the number we measured.

Here is everything, in plain terms:

• Your listing — name, tagline, link, coordinates, stake. Public, and kept for as long as the listing exists.
• Your email address — collected at checkout, never shown publicly, never sold, never passed to anyone else for their own use. It is used to send you the manage link, your receipt, and — only if you opted in — notifications when your country or your city position moves. Every one of those has a one-click unsubscribe.
• Click records — for each outbound click, the plot, the time, the referring page, and a two-letter country code. No IP address is stored, no cookie is set, and no profile of a visitor is built. Kept for 24 months, then deleted.
• Payment records — amount, currency, time and the Stripe identifier. Card numbers never touch our systems; Stripe holds those. We keep payment records for seven years because tax law requires it.

Ask us and we will send you everything we hold about you, or delete it. Deleting your account data means removing the listing — the two cannot be separated, since the listing is the thing that is public. Payment records survive deletion for the retention period above, because we are not allowed to destroy them.

There are no accounts and no passwords. The link emailed to you at purchase is the only credential your listing has. Anyone who has that link can edit your listing, so treat it the way you would treat a password: do not post it, do not paste it into a shared document. If you lose it, email us from the address you bought with and we will resend it. Coordinates cannot be changed — a plot is a permanent pin at the point where it was planted.

StartupWorld is provided as it is. We aim to keep it up and accurate, and we do not guarantee either. We are not liable for indirect losses — lost business, lost traffic, lost opportunity. Where liability cannot be excluded, it is limited to the amount you have paid us.

We may change these terms. If a change is material we will date it here and say what changed. Continuing to use the site after that means you accept the change; if you do not, your listing stays up and you simply stop buying more.

These terms are governed by Bulgarian law, and the courts of Bulgaria have jurisdiction.