Terms & Rules for Attention Fund

Last updated: August 14, 2026

Attention Fund lets you stake real money on hitting your own screen-time goals. Because real money is involved, please read this page before you start a challenge. It explains how staking and payouts actually work, what counts as cheating, and what happens to your account if the rules aren't followed.

1. How Staking Works

When you set up a challenge, you choose:

A daily screen-time cap for the apps you're tracking
A challenge length (5, 7, 10, or 14 days, or a custom length of 3+ days)
A deposit amount you're staking on yourself

Your deposit is divided evenly across the days in your challenge. Each day you stay under your cap, you earn that day's slice back as an Attention Dividend. Complete every tracked day and your full deposit is returned. Days you've already earned stay yours no matter what happens later in the challenge.

You can add more money to an active challenge to increase your stake, but you cannot reduce your deposit once it's set.

Amounts

The minimum for a new challenge you pay for is $5.
There is no maximum. You choose the amount.
If you're starting a new challenge using only credit you've already earned back, the minimum is $3 — you're re-staking your own money, not making a fresh deposit.
Adding to a stake you've already started takes whole dollars, $1 or more. You can add any time after your deposit is confirmed, while the challenge is still running.

2. Screen Time Caps & Shields

Attention Fund uses Apple's Screen Time tools to monitor your usage of the apps you choose to track and to apply a "shield" — a block on those apps — if you go over your daily cap.

If you break your shield on a tracked day, you forfeit that day's slice of your stake. Everything you've already earned stays yours.

Disabling or bypassing this monitoring (for example, revoking Screen Time permission) doesn't pause enforcement — see "Cheating & Tampering" below.

3. What You Can Get Back — and What You Can't

You can never receive more than you deposited. The most that can ever come back to you is 100% of your own stake. There is no prize, no pot, no pool of other people's money, and no way to finish a challenge with more than you put in.

Attention Fund is not a contest and you are not playing against anyone. Nothing you do on the leaderboard changes what you are paid — the leaderboard is a score, not a payout. Your money is placed at risk against your own goal and returned to you day by day as you meet it.

If you meet your goal every day, the challenge costs you nothing. It only ever costs you if you choose to break your own shield.

Where forfeited money goes

Forfeited money stays with Attention Fund. It's how the company makes money, and it goes straight back into the product — starting stake credits for new users, and getting the app in front of more people.

Money you forfeit is money you lost against your own goal. We are not holding it for anyone else and it is not paid out to other users.

4. Ending a Challenge and Getting Paid

When your challenge ends, you'll see what you earned back and you choose one of three things to do with it:

Withdraw — we send it to you.
Start Next Challenge — it becomes the stake on a new challenge, with no new payment.
Hold as Credit — it stays in your account until you want it.

Nothing is paid out until you choose. We won't withdraw on your behalf, because doing that would take away your option to keep it as credit instead.

Payouts are sent by hand, by Venmo or Zelle, to the handle or email on your account. Make sure it's right before you request one.
There is no minimum to withdraw. Any amount you've earned back is yours to take.
You can't withdraw mid-challenge. Money you've earned is released when the challenge ends.
Credit you hold has no expiry, and it can be withdrawn later instead of re-staked.

5. Signup vs. Payment Confirmation

Your challenge officially starts the day you finish onboarding — enforcement (caps and shields) can begin immediately, whether or not your payment has gone through yet.

However, your stake only counts once your deposit is confirmed as paid:

You submit your deposit via Venmo or Zelle after signup.
Until that payment is confirmed, your challenge runs but no money is at risk and no Attention Dividends are paid out — you won't appear on the paid leaderboard, and forfeits aren't recorded against a deposit that doesn't exist yet.
Once your payment is confirmed, your stake becomes active: dividends begin counting for tracked days going forward, and shield breaks from that point on will forfeit that day's slice.

6. Cheating & Tampering

Cheating means doing anything to make it look like you met your goal when you didn't, or disabling the systems we use to track and enforce your challenge. This includes, but isn't limited to:

Revoking Screen Time / Family Controls permission mid-challenge to stop the app from seeing your usage or applying a shield
Uninstalling, tampering with, or otherwise disabling the app's monitoring so usage can't be recorded
Falsifying baseline data, usage, or goal information to manipulate your dividend, streak, or leaderboard score
Creating multiple accounts to manipulate the leaderboard or payout system

How this is actually enforced today

If you revoke Screen Time authorization while a challenge is active, Attention Fund logs the event — when access was revoked and, if applicable, when it was restored — and immediately notifies our admin team. This shows up on an internal "Suspicious Activity" view where every open or past revoke event, across all users, is reviewed by a person.

This is a manual review process, not an automatic penalty: revoking access does not by itself forfeit a day, adjust your score, or ban you. An admin reviews the gap and decides whether it looks like an innocent permission hiccup or an attempt to dodge enforcement, and follows up accordingly — which can include a warning or a ban.

7. Enforcement: Ban vs. Account Deletion

These are two different actions, with very different consequences.

Ban (suspension)

An admin can ban an account found to be cheating, tampering with tracking, or otherwise abusing the system.
A banned account is immediately signed out and blocked from using the app.
Your data isn't deleted — your account, history, and challenge data remain intact.
A ban is reversible: an admin can unban the account, restoring normal access.

Account Deletion

Deletion permanently removes all of your challenge data, history, and account information from our systems.
It also deletes your login itself — you will not be able to sign back in with that account afterward.
Deletion is permanent and cannot be undone. There is no way to recover a deleted account or its data, including any pending payouts.
You can request deletion of your own account at any time by contacting us (see below); an admin may also delete an account for severe or repeated violations of these rules.

8. Changes to These Rules

We may update these Terms & Rules from time to time as the app evolves. We'll update the "Last updated" date above when we do. Continuing to use Attention Fund after a change means you accept the updated rules.

9. Contact Us

Questions about these rules, or want to appeal a ban or request account deletion? Contact us at:

contactattentionfund@gmail.com