BidBoard — Pay-to-Rank Leaderboard (Next.js + Stripe)

BidBoard is a pay to rank leaderboard you own outright

Put a board online, let people pay for a position on it, and keep every cent. Listings are ranked by the amount paid, highest first. Pay more than the listing above you and you move above it. There is no algorithm, no ad network, no revenue share and no accounts. Rank is the bid, nothing else.

It ships as a complete, working product: the public board, Stripe checkout, payment confirmed listing creation, owner self service and a full admin panel. Install it, connect Stripe, and you are selling positions the same afternoon.

Why buyers pick it

• Payment safe by construction. A rank is granted only by a signature verified Stripe webhook. The handler is idempotent, so a retried or replayed notification can never charge twice or duplicate a listing.
• Nobody has to sign up. Bidders manage their listing through a secret link. You get in with one username and password. There is no user table to secure and no password resets to support.
• Tune it live. Minimum bid, increment, currency, page size, takeover rules and rate limits are all editable from the admin panel at runtime. No redeploy, no file editing.
• Runs on one machine with no database server. SQLite by default. Switch to PostgreSQL or MySQL by changing one line when you outgrow it.
• Optional everything. Beyond Stripe, no third party account is required. Email is off until you turn it on. Analytics are built in.

The bidding engine

• Listings ranked strictly by amount paid, highest first.
• Equal bids keep the order they were claimed in, so matching a bid never displaces the listing it matched.
• Bidders do not have to beat number one. Any bid at or above the minimum earns a position, which keeps a board with an expensive leader still sellable.
• Re bidding is a top up. Raise an existing listing and you are charged only the difference between what it already holds and the amount you move it to.
• Board takeovers: buy the top of the board outright for a fixed window at the current top bid plus a percentage you set, shown as a full width banner with a live countdown. Expires on its own, with no cron job to configure.
• Website URLs and social handles are accepted. Chat and invite links are rejected at submission.

The board updates itself

When a bid lands, every open page shows the new ranking, the new price and the new activity within a couple of seconds. Nobody reloads. It runs over Server Sent Events, which is a plain HTTP response that stays open, so it needs no extra server, no new dependency and no second port. If a connection cannot be held open the page falls back to refreshing on a timer and says so, rather than sitting on stale numbers.

Nothing to fill in but a domain

A bidder types their domain and presses one button. BidBoard reads the title, pitch and icon from their own site, shows them a preview of the row they are buying, and hands off to Stripe. Email address and receipt preference are collected by Stripe on its own payment page, so the board never asks for either.

Admin panel

• Branding: board name, logo and one brand color, applied instantly across the board, the admin panel, the social card and the receipt emails. The hover, tint and hairline shades are derived from your color for both the light and dark themes.
• Legal: write your own terms and privacy policy in the panel. Each page publishes itself, and appears in the footer, only once you have written it.
• Listings: moderate, restore, delete, adjust amounts by hand, open any owner's view, end a takeover early.
• Payments: gross, refunded and net totals, one click refunds through Stripe, and receipt status per payment. Refunds issued in the Stripe dashboard are mirrored back automatically.
• Boards: run several leaderboards from one install, for example one per category. The default board is served at your site root, the rest at their own paths.
• Settings: every rule editable at runtime, each showing the environment value it falls back to, with a one click reset.
• Email: both receipt switches, sender addresses, a test send and a full delivery log.

Email receipts, entirely optional

BidBoard can email a receipt when someone wins a rank, and tell a listing owner when they have been outbid. Nothing is ever sent unless two independent switches both allow it: your master toggle, and the bidder's own choice on the Stripe payment page. Turn the master switch off and bidders are never asked at all, no address is stored, and they receive their management link on the confirmation page instead.

The integration is vendor neutral. It posts the JSON body that every mainstream transactional email API accepts, to whatever endpoint you configure. There is no default endpoint, so nothing is ever sent anywhere you did not choose.

Built in, not bolted on

• Click tracking per listing, with configurable utm tagging on outbound links. No third party analytics to wire up and no cookie banner to add.
• Latest activity and Trending right now panels on the board, both read from real data: recent claims with the rank each one reached, and clicks per hour over a rolling window.
• Colored initials stand in whenever a listed site publishes no icon, or its icon later stops loading, so the ranking never shows a broken image.
• Light and dark themes with a toggle, following the visitor system setting until they choose.
• Social cards generated live, including the current top three listings, so every share of your board shows the real ranking.
• Public JSON API for the ranking and for live pricing, so you can embed the board elsewhere or build your own front end.
• Anti spam: rate limiting that works across serverless instances, a honeypot field, a minimum time on form check, and a blocklist for disallowed link types.
• Setup checklist page that tells you exactly what is still missing, and never prints a secret, so it is safe to open on a live site.

Built with

Next.js 15 with the App Router, React 18, TypeScript, Prisma and Tailwind CSS. Server rendered, so the board is fast and indexable. Deploys to any host that runs Node, including a plain VPS.

Rebranding

Name, logo and brand color are admin panel fields, so most rebranding needs no code at all. The neutral tones behind them come from one block of CSS variables if you want to go further. The legal and explanatory wording lives in a single file, so the Stripe checkout page, the rules page and the receipt emails can never drift apart. No fonts are bundled or downloaded, so the package builds with no network access and there is nothing extra to license.

Documentation

A single offline manual, sixteen sections behind a fixed sidebar, with real screenshots of every surface, an annotated diagram of how a payment becomes a rank, and an expected outcome line on every install and configuration step. Mandatory setup and optional integrations are kept in clearly separate sections. It ships as HTML and as a PDF, needs no internet connection, and opens straight from the package.

Live demo

Demo board: https://bidboard.foundrcode.com

Admin panel: https://bidboard.foundrcode.com/admin

Admin username: bidboard_admin

Admin password: BidBoardDemo!

The admin panel is read only on the demo, so you can open every screen without changing the board for the next visitor. Bidding is fully live.

The demo runs in Stripe test mode. To place a test bid, use card number 4242 4242 4242 4242 with any future expiry date and any three digit security code. No real money moves. The demo database is reset periodically.

Third party services and costs

Stripe is the only service BidBoard requires. Any fees charged by Stripe, or by an email provider if you choose to enable receipts, are billed by that provider directly to you under your own account with them. Those fees are not included in the price of this item. All optional integrations can be left unconfigured and the board runs without them.

What is included

• Full commented TypeScript source, with no obfuscated or minified files.
• Database schema and migrations, plus a fictional demo dataset.
• The complete offline documentation.
• Six months of item support, extendable at checkout.