How it works

If you are backing something

Choose a reward tier, or pledge without one. You are charged when you pledge, and the money is held on the platform’s account. A pledge cannot be cancelled; while the campaign is taking pledges you can raise it with a higher tier or an extra.

A campaign succeeds at 80% of its goal. From then on its creator can withdraw the money, or extend the deadline once. If the campaign has not reached 80% by its deadline, or by the end of the extension, every backer is refunded in full and no fee is charged.

Once a creator withdraws, the payout is held for fourteen days. In that time a backer can dispute their payment and an administrator decides; an upheld dispute is refunded in full.

Then the creator asks you some questions

Most rewards need something the campaign page cannot know: a size, a colour, an edition, and somewhere to send it. That arrives as a survey, and it appears under surveys in your account. Your shipping address is held separately from your answers and encrypted at rest, and it belongs to the pledge rather than to your account — so two campaigns can go to two different places.

As parcels go out, deliveries shows the carrier and the tracking number for each one.

If you are running a campaign

• Draft it. A title, a summary, a category, a goal, a duration between one and sixty days, and a cover image. The story needs at least 500 characters and the risks section at least 200 — both are required.
• Add rewards. Up to a hundred tiers, each with a price, what is in it, and where it ships. A tier’s price cannot change once the campaign is live, and a tier with backers cannot be deleted — only hidden.
• Submit it for review. A person reads it. They approve it, ask for changes, or reject it with a reason.
• Launch. From this point the goal and the deadline are fixed. Everything else — the story, the updates, the reward quantities upwards — stays editable.
• Deliver. Send the survey, collect the addresses, lock them when you start printing labels, and record tracking as parcels go out.

What you are agreeing to as a backer

A pledge funds an attempt rather than buying a finished object. The creator owes you an honest account of how it is going — that is what campaign updates are for — and the platform owes you the tools to see it and to report a campaign that is not being honest. Neither of those is the same as a guarantee that the thing will arrive.

Trust and safety sets out what is checked, and what to do when something is wrong.