Terms of Service

Effective and last updated 21 August 2026. Plain English, because you are about to spend money.

1. Who we are

AgencyLadder (agencyladder.com) is operated by OnDutyOps LLC ("AgencyLadder", "we", "us", "our"). These terms are a contract between OnDutyOps LLC and anyone who lists a business, pays, or otherwise uses the service (the "Service").

• Registered name: ONDUTYOPS LLC
• Registered address: 16192 Coastal Highway, Lewes, Delaware 19958, United States
• Founder: Odera Joseph Echendu
• Support email: [email protected]

2. What the Service is

AgencyLadder is a public leaderboard, open to agencies, service providers, and businesses of any kind. Position on it is determined by one thing only: the amount a listing has paid, adjusted for decay as described in section 8. Nothing else affects position, not quality, not reviews, not our opinion, not any assessment of the work a listed business does.

We do not vet, verify, endorse, or recommend any listing beyond the standing removal right described in section 9. Appearing at the top of the board means that business paid the most. It means nothing else, and you should not read it as meaning anything else.

2A. What the Service is not

The Service is an advertising and directory platform. It does not provide, offer, or facilitate gambling, betting, wagering, lotteries, sweepstakes, prize draws, or any game of chance. There is no prize, no draw, and no random or hidden element of any kind. The price of every position is calculated from published rules and displayed before you pay.

Every business that pays is listed. No payment is ever forfeited without a listing being provided. This is not an auction: there is no bidding fee, no losing bidder, and no circumstance in which you pay and receive nothing. What you buy is a published listing on the directory together with its position in the order at the time of payment.

Delivery is immediate and complete on publication. The advertising service is fully delivered the moment your listing appears on the board, which happens as soon as your payment clears. Because placement is competitive and continuous, your position is fluid by design: any other business may pay more and move above you at any time, and every payment reduces 2% a day as described in section 8. A later change in your position is the Service working as described, not a failure to deliver it, and is not grounds for a refund or a chargeback. You acknowledge and accept this when you pay.

3. Eligibility

You must be at least 18 years old and able to form a binding contract to use the Service. You may list only a business you are authorised to represent, either because you work for it, own it, or have that business's permission to list it on its behalf. Listing a business you have no authority over is a breach of these terms and grounds for immediate removal without refund.

You are responsible for keeping your listing email address current and secure, since it is the only credential the Service uses. See section 12 for how sign-in works.

4. Your listing: content and your warranties

By submitting a listing you confirm that: the business name, description, website, logo, and any other content you submit is accurate and not misleading; you have the right to use any logo, name, or trademark you upload; the linked website does not contain malware, illegal content, or material that infringes a third party's rights; and you will keep the listing reasonably current.

You are solely responsible for your listing's content and for the website it links to. We do not review linked websites on an ongoing basis and are not responsible for their content or availability.

5. How bidding works

• The minimum bid is $1 USD. Bids are whole dollars only, no cents.
• Passing whoever is directly above you costs their current effective bid plus $5, rounded up to the next whole dollar.
• Position is by effective bid, highest first. Where two listings are exactly equal, whichever listed earlier ranks higher.
• You may bid again at any time to raise your effective bid. Each bid is a separate, immediate, non-refundable payment (section 7).

6. Payment via Stripe

Payments are processed by Stripe, Inc. We do not receive or store your card details; we receive only Stripe's confirmation that a payment cleared and the amount charged. The amount credited to your bid is always the amount Stripe confirms was actually charged, never an amount you or your browser reports to us. By paying you also accept Stripe's own terms of service.

Chargebacks: because bids are non-refundable and the position is delivered immediately on payment, initiating a chargeback for a bid that was correctly applied to the board is a breach of these terms. The moment Stripe notifies us of a dispute, that specific bid stops counting toward your effective balance automatically, whether or not we take any further action on the listing itself. We may also remove the listing associated with a disputed payment and decline future listings from the same business or email address.

8. The decay mechanism, as a term

Every bid decays at a fixed rate of 2% per day, compounding, calculated from the date and time that specific bid was placed. Decay is continuous and applies for as long as the bid exists; it never pauses and never stops. Because decay is exponential, a bid's value approaches zero but mathematically never reaches it, decay alone will never remove your listing from the board or from its own page (see section 10).

Your effective bid at any moment is the sum of every bid you have made, each decayed independently from its own date. A later bid does not reset or restore the decayed value of an earlier one.

Rank and every displayed dollar figure are calculated live, at the moment they are requested, from the record of bids actually paid. There is no separate scheduled process that could fail to run; the calculation cannot go stale.

8A. What happens if you stop paying

Nothing happens to your listing. If you never bid again, your existing balance keeps decaying at 2% a day, exactly as it always did, and your rank falls as other listings pass you. Your listing stays live, your profile page stays up, and your outbound link keeps working, for as long as the listing exists. Decay is a ranking mechanism, not a removal mechanism: it can send your balance toward zero, but it cannot take a listing off the board, and it never creates a debt.

We also do not charge your card again on our own. Every dollar debited was for a specific bid you placed; after that, no further payment is ever taken automatically, and there is no auto-renewal or standing authorization to draw on.

9. How a listing is created, and our removal right

A listing is created only by paying through Stripe Checkout. The moment Stripe confirms the charge, our webhook creates the listing live and visible immediately, on the board, in the directory, in the sitemap, and on its own page. Payment is the only gate: nobody reviews a listing before it appears, and none is held in a queue.

We reserve the right to remove any listing at our sole discretion, at any time after it goes live, including for misleading content, links to malware or illegal content, impersonation, a business the submitter is not authorised to represent, or content we consider unsuitable for a public leaderboard. This is always a check made after the fact, never a delay before publication.

Removal under this section does not entitle you to a refund of any bid already paid, except as described in section 7.

10. Removal and suspension

You may pause your own listing at any time; a paused listing comes off the board immediately but is not deleted, and you may resume it. We may suspend or remove a listing for a breach of these terms, including the warranties in section 4, a disputed or reversed payment (section 6), or content that fails the standard in section 9.

Removal for a breach of these terms does not entitle you to a refund of bids already paid. Removal for any other reason is governed by section 7.

10A. If a listed business turns out to be a scam

Payment is the only gate to listing (section 9), so we do not vet a business before it appears. If you believe a listed business is fraudulent, is impersonating another business, or is otherwise a scam, email [email protected] with the listing's URL and what is wrong. We investigate reports of fraud and impersonation and will remove a listing found to violate the warranties in section 4 or the standard in section 9.

Removing a scam listing does not refund whatever it paid to be there (section 7), and it does not create any liability to you or to a third party for the time the listing was visible; the disclaimer of warranties in section 14 and the limitation of liability in section 15 apply here as everywhere else. We are a directory, not a verifier: appearing on the board is not, and has never been, our endorsement that a listed business is legitimate.

11. Paid-placement disclosure

Every position on the AgencyLadder board is a paid placement. This is not incidental, it is the entire product: rank is purchased, and the price of every position is displayed live next to it. Nothing on the board is earned through merit, review, vote, or editorial judgment. Where required by applicable advertising or consumer protection law (including FTC guidance in the United States), we treat every listing as a form of paid advertising and disclose that plainly, on the board, on this page, and on the how-it-works and rules pages.

12. Sign-in and outbound links

Sign-in uses a single-use, time-limited link sent to your listing's email address; there are no passwords stored anywhere in the Service. You are responsible for keeping access to that email address.

Every outbound link from a listing to its own website carries rel="noopener sponsored nofollow". This both discloses the link as paid placement and prevents it from passing search-ranking credit, which protects both your listing and the domain the link points from.

12A. Deleting your listing and your data

You can pause your listing yourself at any time (section 10); pausing takes it off the board immediately without deleting anything, so you can resume later. To have your listing and the personal data tied to it deleted instead, including the email address on the account and the hashed IP records used for click counting, email [email protected] and we will remove them. Self-serve deletion is not built yet; this is a manual request we act on by hand.

Deleting your listing does not entitle you to a refund of bids already paid (section 7). We may retain payment records that Stripe or applicable law requires us to keep even after a listing is deleted; those records are about the transaction, not about making you findable on the board. Full detail on what we collect and why is in the Privacy policy.

13. Intellectual property

AgencyLadder's name, design, and software are our property or that of our licensors. You retain ownership of your business name, logo, and description; by submitting them you grant us a non-exclusive, worldwide licence to display them on the board, on your listing page, in generated images (such as social preview cards), and in the site's search-indexing surfaces, for as long as your listing exists.

14. Disclaimer of warranties

The Service is provided "as is" and "as available", without warranty of any kind, express or implied, including any implied warranty of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, or non-infringement. We do not warrant that the Service will be uninterrupted, error-free, or that click counts, rank figures, or any other statistic will be exact or audited; click counts are approximate and filtered for identifiable automated or repeated activity, not certified figures.

15. Limitation of liability

To the maximum extent permitted by law, our total liability to you for any claim relating to the Service is limited to the amount you paid us in the 30 days preceding the claim. We are not liable for indirect, incidental, or consequential loss, including lost profits, lost business, or lost opportunity. Nothing in these terms excludes liability that cannot lawfully be excluded.

16. Indemnity

You agree to indemnify and hold OnDutyOps LLC harmless from any claim, loss, or expense (including reasonable legal fees) arising from your listing content, your breach of the warranties in section 4, your use of the Service in violation of these terms, or your infringement of any third party's rights.

17. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms as the Service changes. Material changes are reflected in the date at the top of this page. Continued use of the Service after a change constitutes acceptance of the updated terms.

We do not maintain a mailing list for terms updates and do not email you individually when these terms change. The effective date at the top of this page is the record of when it last changed; if you want to know whether something changed since you last read it, that date is the thing to check.

17A. Dispute resolution

Before filing a claim against us, email [email protected] and describe the problem. Most disagreements are about a specific bid, a specific listing, or a specific charge, and are resolved by email faster than any court could resolve them. If we cannot resolve a dispute informally within 30 days of your email, either party may proceed as described in section 18.

18. Governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Delaware, United States, without regard to its conflict-of-laws principles. Any dispute arising from these terms or the Service will be brought in a court of competent jurisdiction located in Delaware.

18A. Assignment

We may assign or transfer these terms and our rights and obligations under them, in whole or in part, without notice to you, including as part of a merger, acquisition, financing, or sale of assets. You may not assign or transfer your rights or obligations under these terms to anyone else without our prior written consent; a listing belongs to the business and the email address that created it, not to a third party.

18B. Severability

If a court of competent jurisdiction finds any part of these terms unenforceable, that part is limited or removed to the smallest extent necessary, and the rest of these terms remains in full force and effect.

19. Privacy and contact

What we collect and why is described in full in the Privacy policy. For questions, corrections, or removal requests under these terms: [email protected].