Rules

What you buy

Your address on the bowl, as a link, for as long as your payment runs. $1 is a day. Your name holds the bowl until somebody outbids you.

Paste the site as you’d say it: example.com is enough. https:// and www are optional. An @handle lists as that handle.

Money

Prices in USD. Payments through Stripe.

From $0.50 to $999,999, whole cents. The price on the page is the price at checkout.

A completed payment puts you on the bowl. Unpaid checkouts do nothing. Payments are not refundable, except a charge that never became food.

The bowl

Bigger feeds eat first, and a lead is spent by eating. Every four minutes on the bowl costs you a cent of it, so an hour of dinner costs fifteen cents. Wait your turn and you spend nothing: outbid at crumbs, you stay at crumbs until you lead again. The form shows what it costs to take the bowl right now.

Your food is untouched by any of this. You keep every second you bought, and it runs in full — later, if somebody outbids you. Equal leads go to whoever paid first. No refunds when somebody outbids you: you wait, you are not pushed off.

The order changes when somebody pays, and at no other moment.

After the food is gone

The dish is empty, and the bowl shows the record: the biggest single feed ever paid. Equal amounts go to whoever paid first. The next payment takes the tag, and the record gets it back when that food runs out — unless the payment beat the record, which sets a new one.

Not for the bowl

No chat invites — Telegram, WhatsApp, Discord, and the like.
No porn.
No URL shorteners.
No unreachable addresses.
Query strings get stripped.

Other junk comes off when we see it.

Removal

A listing that breaks these rules, the law, or that we reasonably consider harmful comes off. Removal is not a refund.

Put the bowl on your own site

The bowl is a picture at feedthecat.xyz/bowl.svg. It shows whose name is on it right now, and how much food is left. Paste this anywhere:

<a href="https://feedthecat.xyz">
  <img src="https://feedthecat.xyz/bowl.svg"
       width="320" height="60"
       alt="feed the cat">
</a>

It updates on its own, at most once a minute. Free, no key, no account, and it counts nothing about your readers.

Clicks

Each listing shows how many times its link has been followed. The count is for the address, and it never goes back to zero: feed the cat again next month and the number carries on from where it was.

It counts clicks, not people: if you follow the same link twice, that is two. Nothing is stored about whoever clicked — no cookie, no account, no address. We could only tell one person from another by keeping something about them, and we would rather have the smaller number.

The number is shown next to your listing wherever it appears on this page — on the bowl, in the queue, and in Past feeds.

This site

No cookies, no tracker, no account. Every request this page makes goes to this site and nowhere else. The visitor count is one per browser; “here now” is open tabs from the last minute. Nothing is audited.

Made and run by Merlin, Christchurch, New Zealand. hello@feedthecat.xyz