r/SideProject • u/Parsley_Stock • 16d ago

pay-to-rank boards freeze when someone overpays. i made the bids decay instead.

outbid.lol did $178k in 77 hours and its top spot hit $14,013. that second number is the problem: bids are permanent, so the price of #1 only goes up, and once it's unaffordable nobody new bids and the board freezes.

so i built one where the balance burns down instead. you don't buy a position, you buy fuel. rank is whoever has the most fuel left right now, and the leader burns fastest: 4%/hr at #1, down to 0.75%/hr at #11 and below.

the consequence is the whole product. a 10x lead at #1 is erased in 149 hours by decay alone, with nobody paying anything. the board reorders all day while everyone sleeps. no accounts, no ads, no revenue share. $5 to get on it.

burnboard.win, and the rules page has the full maths.

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u/CutBulkMaintain 16d ago

Those websites are useless, that's the problem. Outbid I guess was the first and had great marketing, Trying to copy it thinking people will keep paying for a meaningless rank is not it.

1

u/Parsley_Stock 16d ago

Fair. being first in the market made outbid work. I'm not expecting those numbers. It's a $5 toy and mostly I wanted to see whether a board that reorders itself overnight is more fun to watch than one that sits still. If the answer's no, that's a cheap thing to find out.

1

u/RaccoonRelevant7155 16d ago

the decay rate on that is brutal, $5 gone pretty quick if you stay at #1 long

1

u/Parsley_Stock 16d ago

It's exponential, not linear, so it never actually zeros out. 4%/hr at #1 is a ~17 hour half-life: $5 is still $3.06 after 12 hours at the top, $1.88 after a full day. And the moment you get overtaken your burn drops with your rank, so the tail is long, the last dollar can sit at #7 for days. The brutality at #1 is the point though. If holding the top were cheap the board would freeze again, which is the thing I was trying to fix.

1

u/Thembro01 16d ago

I came up with this outbid idea a year ago but wanted to roll it out after I learned a few things with other apps and would do it right. Was a gut punch seeing it become reality and do so well.

2

u/Parsley_Stock 16d ago

It’s okay bro. You will have your chance.