The 48-hour teardown guarantee

Feedback requests fail in one of two ways on most platforms. Either nobody answers and your credits (or your money) just sit there, or somebody answers with three sentences of vague encouragement that tells you nothing about whether your product actually works. Founders is built to make both of those failure modes structurally impossible — and where we can't guarantee an answer in time, we guarantee your credits back instead.

Here's exactly how it works, mechanically, so you know precisely what you're getting when you spend a credit here.

Requesting: slots, deadlines, and escrow

When you ask for feedback on your product, you choose two things: how many reviewers you want (1 to 5 slots) and how long you're willing to wait (1 to 30 days). The cost is simple — 1 credit per slot, no hidden multiplier, no "premium matching" upcharge. If you ask for 3 slots, you escrow 3 credits, full stop.

That word — escrow — matters. Your credits aren't spent the moment you hit submit. They're held against specific reviewer slots until those slots are actually filled with a real, accepted review. If a slot goes unfilled by your deadline, it's refunded automatically. Filled slots are never refunded, because you got what you paid for; unfilled slots are never kept, because you didn't. There's no manual appeal process required — the refund logic runs the same way whether you cancel the request yourself or it simply expires.

Why 48 hours

We didn't pick "48 hours" as a slogan — we picked it as the realistic window for a review to actually get done well. Long enough that a reviewer can sit down and give your product genuine attention instead of a rushed skim; short enough that you're not left wondering for a week whether anyone's going to show up. You can extend the deadline up to 30 days for a slower, more considered ask, or tighten it for launch-day urgency — the guarantee holds either way: you get real reviews inside your window, or your credits come back.

The grading bar: 60 out of 100

This is the part that makes the guarantee mean something instead of just being a refund policy. Every review submitted against your request is graded by AI in seconds, against a 0–100 rubric, and it has to clear 60 to count as accepted.

That threshold isn't arbitrary — it's the line between "this person engaged with your product" and "this person typed something to collect a credit." A review that says "looks good, nice work!" doesn't clear 60. A review that walks through what worked, what's confusing, and what to fix next generally does. The reviewer only gets paid — credit and reputation — if their work clears the bar, which means the only way for anyone to profit from reviewing your product is to actually review it.

For requests using the Bug Hunt template, the rubric leans hardest on reproducibility: exact repro steps outscore vague bug reports, because "it's broken sometimes" isn't actionable and "click X, then Y, error appears" is.

Instant payout, both directions

The moment a review clears 60, two things happen immediately: the reviewer's credit and reputation land in their account, and you have a review sitting in your inbox to read. There's no approval queue on our end, no "reviews are processed within 3–5 business days." The AI grade is the approval. This is also why the whole system stays honest under load — a reviewer can't game a slow human moderation process, because there isn't one.

You still get final say as the founder: if a reviewer's work earns you a 4-star-or-better rating from you personally, they get a one-time reputation bonus on top of their base payout. That's the only place your opinion moves the needle directly — everything upstream of it (whether the review counts at all) is decided by the same rubric for everyone.

Why the founder personally backstops it

Here's the part that's less about mechanics and more about why we built it this way. I don't want Founders to be a place where founders route around asking for feedback because they're not sure it'll come through. The escrow-and-refund model means the worst case for you is never "I lost credits and got nothing" — it's "my request expired and I got my credits back, so I can try again with a longer deadline or a different template." That's a floor I'm personally responsible for keeping solid, because the entire premise of this platform — that effort is worth more than money here — falls apart the moment credits can just disappear into the void.

If you ever hit an edge case where a request behaves differently than described here — a refund that didn't fire, a review that got accepted without clearing the bar — tell us. The guarantee isn't a marketing claim we hope holds up; it's a set of rules we test against and will keep honest.

The short version

Request 1–5 reviewer slots, pick a 1–30 day deadline, pay exactly 1 credit per slot, held in escrow. Every review is AI-graded 0–100 and needs 60+ to count. Accepted reviews pay the reviewer instantly. Unfilled slots refund automatically, every time, no appeal required. That's the whole guarantee — not a promise about vibes, a description of what the code actually does.