Who holds the money: nobody, and you can check

Bounty money is never in a MakeBounty account, not for a day. When a poster accepts a solution, the charge is created directly on the maker’s own Stripe account. That is not a promise you have to trust us on — it is a fact either side can read back out of Stripe:

• If you are the maker: the PaymentIntent is in your own Stripe dashboard, under your own account, with application_fee_amount equal to 0 and no application-fee object attached to it.
• If you funded the bounty: the charge on your card statement carries the maker’s own business name, not ours. If we were holding it, it would say us.

We say this first because the alternative is what killed the category before us. Bountysource held bounty money and then stopped paying it out, and developers lost it. A platform that never takes custody cannot do that to you, and a platform that does take custody cannot prove it will not.

Bounties — 0% platform fee

When you post a bounty and a solver fulfils it, payment goes directly from you to the solver through Stripe. We never touch the money and we take 0%. Every bounty-funding charge sets application_fee_amount to 0 — you can verify this yourself from the Stripe PaymentIntent, not just our word for it.

Platform fee on a bounty: $0. 0% of any amount is $0, so the platform's share of a $200 bounty is $0, and of a $2,000 bounty it is $0 as well. That is the figure in this page’s machine-readable markup as well, so a search engine or an assistant quoting our pricing quotes $0 rather than one of Stripe’s numbers further down this page.

We are not going to oversell that number, because 0% is not rare. Cad Crowd charges designers 0% on design contests. Ko-fi sells 0% for $12/month, Shopify for $39/month. Printables reaches 0% by paying in store vouchers instead of money. The part that is rare is the paragraph above it: 0%, in cash, that we never hold.

If a bounty is refunded or disputed, the maker pays

This is the cost of the paragraph at the top of this page, and you should know it before you claim a bounty, not after. Because the bounty was charged on the maker’s own Stripe account, everything that reverses it comes out of the maker’s account too:

• The bounty itself. A refund, or a dispute the cardholder wins, is debited from the maker’s Stripe balance. There is no platform float in front of it.
• Stripe’s processing fee on the original charge, which is not returned. Stripe keeps it on a refund — 2.9% + 30¢ of the original amount, per Stripe’s published US card rate.
• Stripe’s dispute fee, if it is a card dispute rather than a refund. $15.00, per the same page, charged to the account the disputed payment was made on.

So a $200 bounty that is charged and then disputed costs the maker $200 + $6.10 + $15.00, and costs us nothing. We are not absorbing the $15.00 today. We would rather print that sentence than print a promise no code of ours keeps — if we start absorbing it, this paragraph will change and the mechanism will be named here. What we will not do is let a maker meet those three numbers for the first time during a dispute, which is why they are on this page and on the bounty page before the claim button.

You can raise a dispute on a bounty for 14 days after it is accepted, and it is reviewed by a person.

Catalogue sales — 92% creator / 8% platform

When you buy a solved file (or a made part) from the catalogue, 92% goes to the creator and 8% funds the platform. That split is shown as separate line items at checkout, not folded into one total. It is flat: no tiers, no per-listing fee, no advertising levy added on top, and no holding period before a payout.

No ads, ever

The platform is ad-free. It is funded entirely by the 8% catalogue share above.