What £5 actually buys on AEORival

Most directories are vague about what your money buys, and the vagueness is the product. This page is the opposite. If you are thinking about taking a position, you should be able to read this once and know exactly what happens to your money.

What the entry price is

Entry is £5 in the UK, $5 in the US, S$7 in Singapore and RM20 in Malaysia. It is priced by country, not by city — a Manchester position costs what a London position costs, because splitting price by city would need demand data we do not have and are not going to invent.

That £5 is a floor, not a fee. It is the minimum that puts you into the sponsored tier on a board. It is not a subscription, it is not a monthly charge, and there is no per-lead cost on top.

What it buys

A numbered, labelled sponsored position above the free list, showing your business and the amount you spent.

Five positions render in full on each board. That is a statement about how many fit on the page, not a cap on how many businesses can hold a position — any number of businesses can be in the ladder, and everyone below the fifth is still ranked and still shown. Nobody pays for a position that cannot be seen.

Position is decided by trailing 30-day spend. Spend more than the business above you and you take that position. Spend nothing further and your total decays as older payments age past thirty days, so positions are held by continued spending rather than by whoever got there first. Where two businesses have spent the same, the one who paid earlier holds the higher position.

What it never buys

This is the part that matters more than the price.

It never buys a place in the free list, or a better one. Every business we list appears in the neutral A-to-Z list whether it has ever paid us or not. That list is alphabetical. Money cannot reorder it, and no amount of spending removes a competitor from it. If you never pay us anything, you are still on it, with a full profile.

It never buys a quality signal. A sponsored position means someone paid for prominence. It does not mean they are better, safer or more qualified, and we say so on the board itself, in the page text and in the structured data machines read. We are not going to sell you a badge that implies a judgement we have not made.

It never buys the machine-readable list. The complete list of businesses on a board is what answer engines read and cite, and it is not for sale at any price. That is the whole argument of the site: what we will and will not do is a fixed rule, not a pricing tier.

It never sets your prices. A bid is advertising spend paid to us. It is not a quote and has no relationship to what you charge a customer. We do not publish trade prices anywhere on this site.

How does that compare to the alternatives?

This is the question the £5 usually provokes — what is the catch at that price? The honest answer is that the catch is the opposite of what people expect: the price is low because the product is small and deliberately limited, not because it is a trial that converts into something expensive.

For context, here is what the established platforms charge a tradesperson for visibility in the same market:

Two things are worth noticing about that table, and neither is that we are cheaper.

The first is that every one of them decides what you pay. A membership is a number they set. A lead fee is a number they set, charged whether or not the lead was any good. On this site, you decide what a position is worth to you, and £5 is simply the lowest you are allowed to decide.

The second is that none of them will tell you what a competitor paid. Ours is printed on the board next to the position, for anyone to read. That is not generosity — it is the only way a sponsored position can be honest. If we hid the amounts, "sponsored" would be indistinguishable from "recommended", and we would be running the model this site exists to argue against.

Is anyone actually bidding?

Right now, no — and that is worth saying plainly rather than dressing it up.

There are 70 live boards and not one of them has a paid position on it yet. Every position on every board is open at the entry price. That means £5 currently takes the top position on any board we run, and it will keep being true until someone takes it.

We could have written that sentence as manufactured urgency. We are not going to, because the site has a rule against inventing pressure and because you can check this one yourself: open any board and look at whether the sponsored tier has anyone in it. When it does, this paragraph changes.

What happens if you pay and it does nothing?

Then it did nothing, and you should stop.

A position buys prominence on a board. Prominence is only worth having if people are looking at that board, and on a new site some boards are quiet. We are not going to promise you leads, because we cannot control whether a customer arrives, and any platform that guarantees otherwise is selling you a number it made up.

What we will do is show you what actually happened — real views, real clicks, real enquiries, no estimates and no invented counters. If those numbers are not there, they will not be there in the dashboard either.

Payments are for a position held over time, and are not refunded when a competitor outspends you — that is what being outbid means, and it is why the amounts are public before you pay rather than after.

The short version

• £5 / $5 / S$7 / RM20 is the minimum to enter, not a subscription.
• Position is trailing 30-day spend; it decays, so it has to be held.
• Being outbid moves you down, never off.
• The free A-to-Z list is alphabetical and never for sale.
• Amounts are public. So is the fact that nobody has bid yet.
• Being listed, claiming your profile and correcting your details are free, permanently.

If any of that is not what you find on the site, the site is wrong and we want to know. Everything above is checkable on a board right now — start at the market list, or read how the whole thing is meant to work.