microPledge help
Rules, fees, and legals stuff
- How do I deposit and withdraw money?
- What RSS feeds have you got?
- What about microPledge house rules and privacy?
- What fees are payable?
- Aren’t patents on the dark side? Why is microPledge patented?
- Why are there no adverts on Sundays?
- Overview | Funding projects | Development process
- Pledging | New features | Rules, fees, general | Developer API
How do I deposit and withdraw money?
At the moment all money is transferred using PayPal. To put money into your microPledge account, just go to your profile and add funds. When you’ve earned funds from a project, you can withdraw funds at any stage.
PayPal has its faults, but at present it’s one of the few payment providers who allow automated transactions going both ways, as well as supporting quite a number of countries. If you live in a country PayPal doesn’t support, please contact us and make a suggestion.
What RSS feeds have you got?
We have feeds for new projects, comments, users, and pledges, including project-specific feeds. See the all RSS feeds.
What about microPledge house rules and privacy?
In brief, we don’t share your private information and we are fair in our dealings. In turn, we merely require you to be considerate, moral and legal on site. For detail on considerate and moral behaviour, see the Ten Commandments.
You also have to abide by any trading rules presented by our system. The details are all on our privacy and conditions of use pages.
What fees are payable?
microPledge provides many of its services completely free. Consequently, we need to pass on any expenses directly to the users.
Fees for pledgers are only small transaction fees of a few percent charged by payment providers (e.g., PayPal). They will only be deducted when you deposit money into or withdraw money from your account.
Developers have additional fees and penalties as follows (in US dollars):
- License fee:
- Non-software project: 6% of each payment to developer.
- Open source license: Free.
- Closed source license: 3% of each progress payment.
- Proprietary license: 6% of each progress payment.
- Quitting a project early: 10% of your earnings so far; microPledge will pledge the fee to the project so it can be earned by any subsequent developer.
- Refunds. If you don’t finish the project you must refund all your earnings back to pledgers — unless you are doing software and release your source code.
- Incubator: $20.
This might look complicated, but in reality the system takes care of all of it all for you, and in the grand scheme the fees are really very small.
Aren’t patents on the dark side? Why is microPledge patented?
Just like our Incubator: for protection. We think microPledge is a good enough idea that we don’t want some big corporation filing the patent and telling us we can’t operate. We thought of the idea, and we want to retain the right to operate.
To be honest, we filed the patent before we thought up the Incubator. Otherwise we may well have used the Incubator ourselves. If you care about this, drop us a line.
Why are there no adverts on Sundays?
Uh ... Right now, there aren’t adverts on any day as far as I can see.
What if I’m getting bored reading this help?
Impatient you are. I suggest you try it again. This time, let go your conscious self and act on intuition. Use the website: do or do not. There is no try.
— Plegi Master Yoda