Terms of Service

This is a plain-language starter agreement and not legal advice. By using openmog (the “Service”) you agree to these Terms and to our Privacy Policy and Content Guidelines, which are part of these Terms.

1. Who can use openmog

You must be at least 13 years old, and old enough to form a binding contract where you live, to use openmog. By using it, you confirm you meet these requirements and that any information you give us is accurate. You must be at least 18 to use any part of the Service that involves money: backing, bonding, paying to reveal a post, earning credits, or receiving payouts.

2. Your account

Some features require an account and a unique handle. You’re responsible for activity under your account and for keeping access to it secure. Don’t share credentials, impersonate others, or use someone else’s account without permission.

3. Acceptable use

You agree to follow the Content Guidelines and not to misuse the Service. That includes no illegal content, harassment, doxxing, spam, malware, or attempts to manipulate likes, replies, or campaigns, or to scrape, overload, or reverse-engineer the Service. We may limit, suspend, or remove access for violations.

4. Content you post, and the rights you grant

You keep ownership of the content you post (“User Content”). Because openmog is a public platform, you grant openmog a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to host, store, reproduce, display, distribute, and screen your User Content in order to operate the Service, including showing it in the feed, delivering it to the people entitled to see it, and screening it for safety. This license lasts as long as your content is on the Service and for a reasonable period afterward to allow for backups and moderation.

You represent that you have the rights to post your User Content and that it doesn’t violate the law or anyone else’s rights. Posting anonymously hides your handle from other users but does not change these terms or remove your responsibility for what you post.

5. Sealed posts: the short version

A sealed post hides its media behind a public teaser. There are two kinds, and Sections 6 to 15 are the detail behind this summary.

A crowdfund

The creator sets a goal and a deadline. People back it. The moment backing reaches the goal, backers are charged and the media is unsealed publicly. If the deadline passes first, the post stays sealed and nobody who backed it pays anything.

A crowdfund can also carry a bond pool. Bonders put money behind the claim that the post will unseal. If it does, their money is never taken and they earn from the creator’s side. If it doesn’t, their money pays the backers a bonus for showing up.

Pay to reveal

The creator sets a price. You pay it once and you can see the media yourself. It never goes public and there is no deadline.

Who pays, and when

• Back: you pay only if it unseals.
• Bond: you pay only if it stays sealed.
• Reveal: you pay now.

Money on openmog is in US dollars and is handled by our payment processor, Stripe. Card details are entered in Stripe’s own payment fields and go straight to Stripe. openmog never receives or stores your card number. Stripe emails your receipts, and your use of Stripe is also subject to Stripe’s terms. A campaign’s terms are fixed when the post is sealed and cannot be edited afterward, and campaigns resolve automatically, so a short delay between a goal or deadline and the charges, releases, and credits that follow is normal.

On openmog, the creator sets what they receive and receives all of it. The price everyone else sees already includes openmog’s platform fee of 10% of each payment, with a 75 cent minimum per payment. The number shown on the confirm button is the whole charge; nothing is added after you authorize. Section 11 sets out exactly which payments the fee touches.

The rest of the money terms

• 6. Holds are not charges
• 7. Backing a crowdfund
• 8. Bonding a crowdfund
• 9. Paying to reveal
• 10. When a card fails at capture
• 11. Fees
• 12. Your balance, payouts, and withdrawals
• 13. Refunds, disputes, and chargebacks
• 14. Taxes
• 15. Not an investment, not financial advice

6. Holds are not charges

When you back or bond, we ask Stripe to place an authorization hold on your card for the all-in amount shown before you confirm. A hold is not a payment. It reserves the amount against your available credit or balance without moving money. We capture the hold, which is the moment you are actually charged, only when the campaign resolves, and only if the outcome means you owe it.

• We may accept less than you authorized. A backing is limited to the room left under the goal, and a bond to the room left in the bond pool, so if you enter more than is left, only the remainder is accepted.
• We may also trim an acceptance by up to 49 cents, so that a campaign is never left needing an amount too small for a card to charge. If you enter $7.20 against $7.50 of remaining room, we accept $7.00 and leave $0.50, rather than leaving 30 cents that nothing could ever fill.
• Either way, your card is charged at most the all-in price of what we accepted, never more than the hold you confirmed, and the rest of the hold is released.
• If a hold arrives after a campaign has closed, filled, or hit your limit, none of it is accepted and the whole hold is released.
• A released hold can still show as pending on your statement for a few days. How fast a hold clears is your bank’s decision, not ours.
• Card authorizations expire on their own, typically about seven days after they are placed. Campaigns run for at most five days so that a hold outliving its campaign should not happen.
• Stakes are card payments in US dollars. Apple Pay and Google Pay work too, since they run on card rails. Bank debits are not offered, because holds are a card feature.
• You can have a limited number of open holds at once (currently 20) across all live campaigns, and each stake is between $5 and $1,000. The $5 floor exists because our fee has a per-payment minimum: below $5 that minimum would dominate the price you see, and the number on the confirm button would stop reading as your stake.
• A stake cannot be taken back once it is placed. It resolves with the campaign, one way or the other.

7. Backing a crowdfund

A crowdfund is all or nothing. Goals run from $20 to $1,000 and deadlines from one hour to five days, both set by the creator when the post is sealed.

• If the goal is reached before the deadline, backers are charged and the sealed media becomes public for everyone, including people who paid nothing. Backing buys the unsealing, not exclusivity, ownership, or any license to the content.
• If the deadline passes first, the post stays sealed, every backing hold is released, and you pay nothing. If the campaign had a bond pool, you also earn a backer bonus credited to your openmog balance.
• Your backer bonus is keyed to your own stake: the lower of your share of the bond pool and the campaign’s advertised bonus rate applied to what you backed. It arrives at the full advertised rate whenever the pool covers it, because the cost of collecting the bonuses rides the bonders’ charges rather than coming out of the pool. A pool too thin to pay every bonus at that rate pays your share of what it holds instead, so the rate is a ceiling on what you can earn, never a floor. Figures shown while a campaign is running are estimates. The final number is fixed when the campaign resolves.
• Creators may back or bond their own campaigns. The same limits apply to them as to anyone else.
• A live campaign cannot be deleted while it is running. Money is committed to it, so it has to resolve first.
• A campaign that funds is permanent. The unsealed media stays public and the post cannot be deleted afterward, because people paid for it to exist in the open. A campaign that stays sealed can be deleted normally once it has resolved.

The only thing a campaign promises is that a specific piece of sealed media becomes visible. Every post, reply and sealed payload is screened automatically before it is published or can take money: text, images, video and audio. Video and audio are limited to 60 seconds so screening completes before publication. Screening is automated and not a guarantee; reports go to human review. If the screening service is unavailable, sealing is blocked rather than allowed through, so nothing sealed is ever sold unscreened. Ordinary posts and replies are not held back during an outage, and reports and human review are the backstop. We do not promise that what you unseal is true, useful, or what you hoped for, and openmog is not an escrow agent or guarantor for anything a creator says about it. Report anything that breaks the Content Guidelines and we will act on it.

8. Bonding a crowdfund

Bonding backs the campaign’s refund bonus. A bonder guarantees the bonus that makes backing safe, and is paid a capped credit for standing behind it when the post unseals. The bond pool is capped at the bonus rate applied to the goal, and bonds are accepted only up to that cap.

• If the post unseals, your bond hold is released. You are never charged your bond, and you earn a share of the bonus pool, paid from the creator’s proceeds and credited to your openmog balance as bond earnings.
• If the post stays sealed, your bond is charged, but only the all-in amount that covers your share of the backers’ bonuses: your share, grossed up so that our fee on the payment itself still leaves the whole share behind. Anything above that is released. The charge carrying its own collection cost is how the backers receive the full advertised bonus.
• If your hold is too small to carry that all-in amount, the whole hold is charged, our fee on that payment comes out of it first, and the backers share what is left. You are never charged more than the hold behind your bond, and their bonuses come out below the advertised rate.
• If nobody backed the post at all, there is nobody to pay a bonus to. Every bond hold is released and bonders pay nothing.
• If more of your bond was taken than the bonuses ended up paying, the difference comes back to you as a credit on your openmog balance, not as a refund to your card. Section 12 covers how credits are paid out.

Bonding carries real risk. Bonders are paid for guaranteeing the backers’ bonus, and if the post stays sealed, up to the full hold behind your bond may be captured to pay those bonuses. Never bond money you cannot spare.

9. Paying to reveal

A pay-to-reveal post has a fixed price from $5 to $1,000 and no deadline. Paying charges your card immediately. There is no hold and no all-or-nothing step. The price you pay includes our fee; the creator is credited exactly the price they set.

• You get personal access to that post’s sealed media on openmog, for as long as the post exists on the Service. The media never becomes public and you receive no ownership of it and no right to redistribute it.
• A reveal is per person and per post. You are not charged twice for the same post.
• Because access is delivered immediately, a reveal is final. If we cannot deliver the content you paid for, contact us and we will refund it. If a technical hiccup charges you twice for the same post, we refund the duplicate automatically.
• Once anyone has paid to reveal a post, the creator can no longer delete it. Your access is not something a creator can take back.

10. When a card fails at capture

This one matters, so it gets its own section. A goal being reached is provisional until every backer’s card actually settles.

When a goal is reached we capture every backing at once, and some of those captures can fail, because a hold is a bank’s promise about a card rather than a guarantee, and cards get cancelled, frozen, or emptied between the hold and the capture. Here is exactly what happens.

When a backer’s card fails

• The failed backing is dropped. Its hold is released, that person is told, they pay nothing, and they stop being a participant. The dropped stake leaves every total it was part of, including the funding bar, the backer count, and every bonus calculation.
• We retry a failure a few times before giving up. A refusal that comes from the card is treated as final immediately; anything else is dropped only after the retries run out.
• If the drop puts the campaign back under its goal and the deadline has not passed, the campaign reopens. It returns to live at the honest, lower total, with the same deadline, and the media does not unseal. Backers who were already charged stay charged and stay committed to the campaign.
• If the reopened campaign reaches its goal again, it unseals and everyone who was charged keeps their place in it.
• If the deadline passes first, nobody pays for a post that stayed sealed. Every backing that was captured is refunded in full to the card it came from, and those backers are treated like backers of a campaign that never funded, including any bonus the bond pool pays.

When a bonder’s card fails

A bond can fail the same way. At the deadline we charge the bond pool, and a bonder’s card can die too. That bond is dropped, they pay nothing, and it leaves the pool. Because the backers’ bonuses are paid out of what the pool actually collected, a dropped bond makes every bonus smaller. This can happen after you have already seen a larger figure on the campaign panel.

What this means before you stake

Two things are true and you should know both. A campaign you saw reach its goal can go back to being unfunded. And money that was already charged can be refunded later, on your bank’s timing rather than ours. If your own card is the one that fails, you are not charged and not penalized, and you can stake again with another card while the campaign is still live.

11. Fees

On openmog the creator sets what they receive, and receives all of it. Our platform fee is 10% of each payment, with a 75 cent minimum per payment, and it is included in the price shown to the payer rather than deducted from the creator. Both rates are fixed when the post is sealed and never move for that post. The number shown on the confirm button is the whole charge; nothing is added after you authorize.

The fee is per payment because our own costs work that way: each card payment costs openmog a percentage plus a fixed amount to collect, and the 75 cent minimum is what covers that fixed cost on small payments. The stake or price a participant chooses is always the number that counts toward the goal or reaches the creator; the charge is the all-in price that collects it. A $5 stake counts $5.00 toward its goal and charges the card $5.75. A $100 stake charges $111.12.

• A campaign that funds. Each backer’s card is charged the all-in price of their stake, the bond pool is credited, and the creator receives the goal in full minus only the bonus pool that filled. On a $100 goal met by twenty $5 backers with a full $25 bond pool, the cards total $115.00, the fee is $15.00, bonders are credited $25.00 and the creator $75.00. The same $100 from a single backer is one payment of $111.12 with a fee of $11.12, and the creator still receives $75.00, or the full $100.00 if nobody bonded.
• A reveal. One payment, one fee. On a $7 reveal the buyer pays $7.78 and the creator is credited the full $7.00.
• A campaign that stays sealed. Backers are charged nothing, so the remaining payments are the bonders’. Each bond is charged the all-in amount that covers its share of the backer bonuses, and the rest of the hold is released, which is what lets the bonuses arrive at the full advertised rate. If $60 was backed against a full $25 pool at a 25% bonus, the backers are credited their $15.00 of bonuses in full, and the two bonders’ cards are charged $16.75 between them, the $15.00 plus $1.75 of fee, when the pool is a $15 bond and a $10 bond. The exact total depends on how the pool was split, because each bond carries its own per-payment fee.
• When a bond cannot cover its share. If a bond hold is too small to carry the all-in amount, the whole hold is charged, the fee on that payment is taken first, and the backers share what is left. Bonuses then land below the advertised rate. That rate has always been a ceiling on a bonus, never a floor.
• No fee is taken on a released hold or on a refund, because no payment happened. And there is no other charge of any kind: the price you see is the whole price.
• Payouts are split to the cent, and the sub-cent remainder left by that division stays with openmog. It is always less than one cent per person, per campaign.

We may change fees for future posts with notice. A change never applies to a post that is already sealed.

12. Your balance, payouts, and withdrawals

Money you earn on openmog is credited to a balance on the Service. It is not sent to your bank automatically.

• Credits are pending for seven days after they are earned and then become available to withdraw. That window exists so a payment dispute can be sorted out before money leaves the platform.
• To withdraw you set up payouts through Stripe. We create a Stripe Express account for you and hand you to Stripe’s own hosted flow, where you accept the Stripe Connected Account Agreement and complete identity verification. openmog never sees your identity documents or your bank credentials.
• Withdrawals start at $50. Sending a payout costs us 0.25% plus 25 cents, another 0.25% to route the funds, and $2 a month for every account we pay out to, so a smaller transfer costs more to send than it is worth. Credits under that floor stay in your balance until they add up to it. We take nothing for sending a payout.
• A withdrawal moves your available credits to your connected Stripe account, and Stripe pays out to your bank on its own schedule. Money typically arrives within 10 days. Timing after money leaves openmog is Stripe’s and your bank’s, not ours.
• If one credit cannot be transferred, the rest still go. The one that failed stays available and can be withdrawn again later.
• Until you set up payouts, credits simply sit in your balance. We don’t expire them. But we cannot send you money without a connected account, and Stripe decides who it will accept.
• Your balance is a record of what we owe you. It is not a bank account or a deposit, it earns no interest, and it is not insured. openmog is not a bank.
• We may pause a payout, hold a credit, or reverse one while we investigate fraud, manipulation, a chargeback, or a breach of these Terms, and we may recover money we paid out in error from later credits.

13. Refunds, disputes, and chargebacks

Most of what would be a refund elsewhere is a released hold here: you were never charged in the first place. Actual card refunds happen when a captured backing has to be reversed, which is the case described in Section 10.

• Refunds go back to the card that paid. We send them promptly; when they appear on your statement is up to your bank.
• Some money comes back as a balance credit rather than a card refund. Backer bonuses, bond earnings, and returned bond money are credits, and credits are paid out under Section 12.
• If you think a charge is wrong, email us first at support@openmog.com. It is faster than a chargeback and it lets us actually fix the problem.
• When a dispute is opened on a payment, we pause backing, bonding, revealing and withdrawals on that account while it is open. If the dispute closes in our favour the pause lifts automatically; otherwise we review it by hand.
• Disputing a legitimate charge with your bank may cost you access. We may suspend an account, reverse credits earned from the disputed activity, and decline future stakes.

14. Taxes

You are responsible for any taxes on money you earn through openmog and for reporting it where you live. As part of payout setup, Stripe may collect tax information from you and issue tax forms where the law requires it. We do not give tax advice.

15. Not an investment, not financial advice

Backing, bonding, and revealing are ways to pay for content and to coordinate a crowd around unsealing it. They are not investments, securities, loans, deposits, or a savings product. You are not buying a share of anything and no return is promised. Bonuses and bond earnings are part of the mechanism, not a yield. Nothing on openmog, including any figure a panel shows while a campaign is running, is financial, legal, or tax advice. Every number shown before a campaign resolves is an estimate from the state at that moment. Never commit money you cannot spare.

16. Intellectual property

The Service itself (its software, design, logo, and branding) belongs to openmog and is protected by intellectual-property laws. These Terms don’t grant you rights to our name or marks except to use the Service as intended.

17. Moderation and termination

Posts, replies and sealed payloads are screened automatically before publication, as Section 7describes, and reports go to human review. We may review, hide, or remove content and may suspend or terminate accounts that violate these Terms or the Content Guidelines, with or without notice. You may stop using openmog at any time, and ask us to delete your account by emailing support@openmog.com. Sections that by their nature should survive termination (such as licenses to already-distributed content, disclaimers, and liability limits) will continue to apply. Live campaigns settle on their own terms: if your account ends while money is in flight, holds are still released, refunds are still made, and credits you legitimately earned are still payable to you, subject to Section 12.

18. Disclaimers

The Service is provided “as is” and “as available,” without warranties of any kind, whether express or implied, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and non-infringement. We don’t warrant that the Service will be uninterrupted, secure, or error-free, or that any content is accurate.

19. Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent permitted by law, openmog and its team won’t be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages, or for any loss of data, reputation, or profits, arising from your use of the Service. Our total liability for any claim is limited to the greater of the amount you paid us in the past twelve months or USD $100. Nothing here limits our obligation to release a hold, make a refund, or pay out a credit that these Terms say is yours. Some places don’t allow these exclusions; where that is the case, our liability is limited to the greatest extent the law allows.

20. Indemnification

You agree to defend and indemnify openmog from claims and costs arising out of content you post or your breach of these Terms, to the extent permitted by law.

21. Changes

We may update the Service and these Terms over time. If we make material changes, we’ll take reasonable steps to let you know. Continuing to use openmog after changes take effect means you accept the updated Terms. Changes to money terms never apply retroactively to a campaign that was already sealed.

22. Governing law

These Terms are governed by the laws of the State of Delaware, USA, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules. Disputes will be handled by the courts located there, unless applicable law requires otherwise.

23. Contact

Questions about these Terms? Email legal@openmog.com. Questions about a payment or a charge? Email support@openmog.com.