Why SummitWar exists

Startup discovery should be exciting—and honest about what moves a project upward.

SummitWar turns sponsored startup discovery into a public mountain race. Founders can plant a project flag, visitors can discover new tools, and everyone sees the same ranking rules, verified holds, activity history, and sponsorship disclosure.

Plant your project flag Read every ranking rule

Discovery for curious visitors

Every approved project receives a public profile with its pitch, website, category, current position, rank history, and privacy-conscious engagement signals. Visitors can browse the live mountain or use the category directory to find relevant products.

Visibility for independent founders

A founder can start with a whole-dollar climb, receive an actual live position after payment verification, and keep a permanent project profile even when the weekly mountain resets. Every paid outbound link is explicitly labelled as sponsored.

Payments and rank stay connected

The browser cannot manufacture altitude. Stripe-hosted Checkout collects payment, a signed webhook confirms the transaction, and one database transaction recalculates the ranking. Duplicate payment events cannot credit the same climb twice.

Privacy without vague metrics

Checkout emails and raw IP addresses are not published. Public visitor and click totals are labelled approximate, known bots are ignored, and activity is deduplicated. Revenue is described as transaction revenue—not recurring revenue or product quality.

What the leaderboard means

Position measures verified sponsored hold—not which product is “best.”

SummitWar does not use votes, reviews, staff picks, or a hidden recommendation score. Higher verified seasonal hold creates a higher position; an earlier project wins a tied hold. This makes the commercial mechanism inspectable while leaving product evaluation to each visitor.

Ranking formulaPublished

Payment confirmationSigned webhook

Activity historyImmutable ledger

Season resetMonday 00:00 UTC

A mountain with memory

Seasonal position resets keep the competition open. Project profiles, lifetime history, summit wins, public activity, and the Hall of Fame remain discoverable, giving both new challengers and past champions a durable record.

Built around verifiable pages

The public site includes dedicated project profiles, category discovery, live statistics, ranking rules, activity records, and champion history. Search engines and AI systems receive the same canonical pages and structured descriptions people can inspect.