Example
Click a few audio and text artifacts below to see where your money would go.
Your bill is $15 minus what you earned.
Circate to date
These are actual totals, not projections.
Settling next
$10.50 out of every $15, every billing period, all of it paid out. Nothing is held back and nothing is redistributed.
$15 a billing period, plus sales tax where your state charges it. $10.50 of it is allocated by what you open, and credited to the people whose work you read or listened to. The other $4.50 covers card processing, hosting and running the place.
Tax is added on top rather than taken out of the $10.50. The allocation is the same number everywhere, whatever your state does.
Anything that puts something in front of you. We call that an open, and there are only two kinds: going to a piece of writing, because the words arrive with the page, and starting audio, whether from the play button or the waveform icon in a list. That is the whole list.
Getting around costs nothing. Outlets, pages, lists, somebody's front page, the Everyone list — none of it counts. Nor does landing on an audio artifact and never starting it, because nothing was delivered.
Something with both words and audio can cost two opens, one for each, if you take both.
Then none of your $10.50 goes to anybody. All of it stays with Circate. Fine by us. You can spend all $15 on us, or just $4.50. It's your money and it's your choice.
Not really. You pay $15 and the most you can send yourself is $10.50, so a period spent only on your own work still costs you $4.50, same as everyone.
So we don't care. Allocate however you want.
Because of the formula. It is the only one on the site:
$10.50 ÷ your opens this period = what each open is worth
The top of that never moves. Opening more doesn't spend more, it cuts the same money into more pieces, so the figure falls all period as you go. The total leaving you is $10.50 whether you open one thing or a thousand.
Everyone paying you has their own version of that formula running. Someone who reads three things a week sends more per open than someone who listens all day, because their $10.50 is divided fewer ways.
Every one of those counts. Repeats are not filtered out, and they all go to whoever made that thing.
The formula doesn't care that it was the same thing twice. Open one thing fifty times and it takes fifty shares of your $10.50 rather than one. That costs you nothing extra. It moves money toward its maker and away from the other people you opened.
So someone who opens your work fifty times out of three hundred is worth fifty times as much as someone who opens it once out of three hundred. What matters is your share of a person's period, not how much they used the site.
You get paid for those. There is no minimum, no threshold and no period where an open is worth nothing. Ten opens pays ten opens' worth, and one person opening one thing pays the full $10.50.
They get the whole $10.50. Your money goes where your attention goes, even if that is one place.
It comes off your next bill. Your bill is $15 minus what you earned, minus anything left over from before. No floor, no cap, no exceptions.
Anything above your bill stays as a balance and goes toward the next one, so a $5 balance plus $10 earned covers a whole $15 period. Once a balance passes $50 you can ask for it in cash instead.
Once a period, on the day you joined. Sign up on the 4th and you are billed on the 4th from then on. There is no shared billing day, so your period is yours and nobody else's.
Your period closes, we work out what everybody earned in it, and your next bill goes out with the credit already on it. Your ledger shows the window and how long is left in it.
Everyone is on their own window, so the people who opened your work are all on different ones. What you earn from someone arrives when their period closes, not when yours does. Anything settled before your bill goes out is on that bill.
If a card fails we know within seconds and the account goes past due. Reading and listening stop until it is sorted out. You keep your work, your ledger and anything you had earned.
Nothing special happens. Your period starts the day you join and runs a month from there. You pay $15 and get the full $10.50 to allocate, exactly like everyone else.
There is no part period and no part allocation, because $10.50 covers one period and always has.
Because we only show you settled figures. What you are owed by somebody is not a fact until their period closes, so it appears when it closes and not before. No number on your ledger that came from somebody else is a running estimate.
Your own allocation is the exception. That is your period and your money, so it moves live and the per-open figure falls as you go.
Site-wide totals work the same way. A month there means the periods that closed in it.
Probably, even though it usually arrives as a smaller bill rather than cash. A credit is still income. We are not your accountant and this is not tax advice, but assume it counts and keep your ledger.
Before we send anyone cash we will need tax details from you, and above the thresholds the tax office sets we have to report what you earned.
Anyone whose work you opened sees how many things you opened in total that period. They have to: it is the bottom of the formula, and without it their share is a number they are asked to take on faith.
What they do not see is what else you opened or whose it was. They see which of their works you opened, your count across them, your total, and the arithmetic between the two.
No. A period where people open your work has to be a period that pays them, and an unfunded one would mean creators seeing activity in their ledger with no money behind them.
Access stops at the end of the period you have paid for, and your page goes inactive. Nobody can reach your work to read or listen to it, so it stops earning.
Nothing is deleted. Everything stays exactly as you left it, and if you start paying again it all comes back. Anything you had already earned is still yours.
Whoever made a thing can see that you opened it, how many times you opened their work altogether, and how many things you opened in total that period. That last number is how they work out what your opens were worth, and without it they could not check what they were paid.
They cannot see what else you opened, or who else you opened. Somebody reading their own ledger sees "63 of 210" against your name — they know you opened 210 things, and nothing at all about the other 147.
They can see which of their works you opened, but not how many times each, and never when.
Nobody else sees any of it. There is no public feed of what anyone is reading or listening to, no trending list, no most-opened, and there will not be one. The only figures anybody outside your ledger sees are totals for the whole site with no names in them.
Your name there is whatever you set as your display name, or your username if you have not set one. Both are in SYS.
All of it, and it is that same formula. Your ledger shows who opened your work, how many times, out of how many things they opened that period, and when their period closes — which is when those opens become money. Your own column adds up to $10.50. It is built from the same query that pays you, so the number you are shown and the number you are paid cannot disagree.
Software has bugs and we are not going to promise otherwise. What we can tell you is how it is built.
Every open is written once to a log that is never edited or deleted, and your ledger is recomputed from that log every time you look at it. There are no stored balances to drift. Amounts are kept in fractions of a cent all period and rounded once at the end, so the column adds up to $10.50 exactly rather than $10.49.
The failure we cannot rule out is an event that never gets written — a connection drops and the open is not recorded. If your own ledger does not match what you did, tell us before your period closes and we will add it.
We can be relaxed about that because of how the money works. Your $10.50 is your $10.50 either way. Adding an open takes nothing from us, it just divides the same money one more way. There is nothing to gain by claiming an open you did not make, so there is nothing for us to adjudicate.