Rung 1: £250 cash
The first trade. £250 cash with a paperclip on it, banked by the founder before a single ticket was sold.
Closes Sat 10 Oct, 10:49pm
…Prize
£250
Includes 1 free postal entry. The draw happens on the closing date, sold out or not.
Vote for Rung 2's prize
Every ticket holder gets one vote. The winner is locked in at the live draw, and you get one half-price ticket on it for every ticket you bought here.
Grab a ticket to get a vote, plus a half-price Rung 2 ticket for every ticket you buy. Already played? Sign in. Entering by post? Write your pick on your postcard.
Where your £5 goes
How we work this out£1
pays for this prize
£2
banks the next prize
£2
runs Payperclip
See the full split, to the pennyHide the full split
- £1.00
This prize
Repays the prize we banked before selling a single ticket.
- £2.00
Next prize
Banked in the Prize Trust account. Becomes the next rung's guaranteed prize. It doesn't buy you an entry into it.
- £0.83
Safety net (pre-VAT)
We're below the VAT threshold, so this slice builds our Prize Safety Net and covers launch costs. It becomes VAT the day we register.
- £0.25
Payment & platform fees
Card processing, the website and age checks.
- £0.40
Running Payperclip
Live draws, support, legal and accounts.
- £0.35
Marketing
So more people join and the ladder climbs faster.
- £0.10
Prize Safety Net
A reserve that backs every guarantee. Balance published on the transparency page.
- £0.07
Profit
We're a business. We'd rather tell you than hide it.
Per £5 ticket. “Runs Payperclip” is everything that isn't a prize: the pre-VAT safety net, fees, running costs, marketing, the Prize Safety Net and profit. Shares are rounded to the penny; profit is whatever is left so the total always adds up exactly.
The prize
£250 cash, paid by bank transfer within 48 hours of verification.
Every Rung 1 ticket puts £2 into the Ladder Fund for Rung 2, gets you a vote on what Rung 2 is, and earns you one half-price Rung 2 ticket. Sell out and Rung 2 starts with £500 in the bank.
Draw facts
- Ticket price
- £5
- Maximum entries
- 250
- Odds if it sells out
- 1 in 250
- Maximum per person
- 25 (paid and free combined)
- Opens
- Sat 3 Oct, 10:49pm
- Closes
- Sat 10 Oct, 10:49pm
- Prize backed by
- Founder's deposit (already banked)
- Draw method
- Live-streamed, winner picked by RANDOM.ORG
Independently drawn
How the winner is picked
We don't pick the winner. RANDOM.ORG, an independent true random number service, picks a number from 1 to the number of entries, live on the stream.
- This draw's RANDOM.ORG ticket was created when sales opened, and it can only ever be used once. So the draw can't be re-run until we like the answer.
- The full entry list is published before the draw, and its fingerprint is sealed into RANDOM.ORG's result.
- The result comes back digitally signed by RANDOM.ORG. We publish it here, with a button to check it on RANDOM.ORG yourself.
RANDOM.ORG ticket: test-9703a3c483e78440 (test mode)
How verification works