The Pledro fee: we only earn when somebody misses

Pledro has one source of revenue today, it is small, and it only exists when somebody does not do what they said they would. This page is the whole of it, including the parts that are worse for us than a reader might assume.

What is the fee?

Our share is taken from the entries of people who did not complete, and it is capped at 10% of the whole reward fund. Whichever of those two numbers is smaller is what we take.

We are paid first out of what was left behind, up to that ceiling. Only the amount above the ceiling becomes the reward for the people who completed.

Three consequences follow, and the first is the one nobody expects.

What happens when only a few people miss?

There is no reward at all, and everybody who completed simply takes their entry back in full.

If ten people enter a £10 challenge and one of them misses, £10 stays in the fund. A tenth of a £100 fund is £10, so what stayed is exactly the ceiling — it is our share, and there is nothing above it to distribute. The nine who completed each get their £10 back and nothing more.

That is the honest shape of the rule, and any copy promising a reward whenever somebody falls short would be wrong. At or under one in ten missing the target, completing returns your entry and no more than your entry.

Push it a little further and the reward appears. Ten people, £10 each, three miss: £30 stays, £10 of it is the ceiling and ours, and £20 is shared among the seven who completed.

What about the odd pennies?

Rewards divide into exactly equal amounts, and where the arithmetic will not divide, our share shrinks to make it.

In that three-miss example, £20 does not divide by seven. So our £10 becomes £9.98, the reward becomes £20.02, and each of the seven takes £2.86 on top of their entry. The rounding always falls on us, never on the people who completed.

The fee is a ceiling that bends downwards. It never bends up.

The worked example

Twenty-five people enter a £20 challenge. Ten of them complete it.

Reward fund	£500
Entries left behind by the fifteen who did not complete	£300
Ten per cent of the fund	£50
Pledro's share — the smaller of £300 and £50	£50
Reward, shared equally by the ten who completed	£250
Each completer receives	£45 — their £20 entry back, plus £25

Nobody pays anything beyond their entry. The fifteen who missed are not charged a penny more; the entry was the whole of the commitment.

18+ for real-money entries · UK · Your limits, your rules · real-money entries are coming, pending authorisation

When does Pledro earn nothing?

Two situations, and they are not edge cases.

Everybody completes. Nothing was left behind, so there is nothing to take. Every entry goes back in full and our share is £0. It is the outcome the whole product is pointed at, and it is the outcome that pays us least. We would rather that were true than write a business model that quietly hopes people fail.

The challenge runs on Grind Coins. Grind is free, it is not money, and it carries no fee at all. The entire amount left behind goes back to the people who completed. Since the whole beta runs on Grind, Pledro's current revenue from challenges is exactly zero.

And if nobody completes?

Nothing is returned to anybody — completing is the only route back to your entry, and that is what gives a challenge its weight. Of what is left, Pledro keeps a tenth and the remaining 90% will be donated to a partner charity.

Two honest caveats belong here rather than in small print. Real-money entries are not live, so not a penny has gone to any charity. And no partner charity has been chosen yet; one will be, and it will be named on this site before the first paid entry is ever taken. There is more on that, and on why it is 90% rather than a token amount, on Pledro for Good.

And on a challenge for a charity?

A challenge can be created in support of a named cause. The entries that stay in the fund go to that charity instead of to the people who completed — and completing still returns your entry in full, exactly as anywhere else.

Our cap halves. On a money charity challenge our fee is capped at 5% of everything entered rather than 10% — enough to cover running and verifying the challenge, and a far smaller margin for us. Half of whatever we take will be donated to the charity as well, rounded in the charity's favour, so we keep no more than 2.5%. That 5% cap holds even when nobody completes: the 10% rule above never applies to a charity challenge.

Charity challenges run on Grind Coins today, where nothing is money, no fee is charged and nothing is donated to anybody. Money charity challenges are not open yet, and how this works is written into the terms in advance of offering one.

Why cap it at all?

Because an uncapped share of the entries left behind is a business that gets richer the more people fail, and that is a bad thing to be. The cap breaks the link: past one in ten missing, every additional entry left behind goes entirely to the people who completed, and our share does not move.

Pledro never takes more than 10% of total entry fees, in any circumstance. That sentence is not a marketing claim — it is written as an assertion in the tests that govern how a challenge completes, so a change that broke it would fail the build rather than quietly ship.

What about everything else?

There is no charge for entering, no charge for creating a challenge, no charge for a returned entry, no subscription and no premium tier. Advertising is a plausible future, in the way it is for any social product, and it is not built.

The rest of the arithmetic, including a calculator you can move the numbers around in yourself, is on Pledro for Good.