Stake terms

What a stake is

A stake is a bank account or card on file and a promise. When you plan a week in the Sunday planner, you can put an amount on it. Nothing is charged while you keep your deadlines. If a planned deadline ends with nothing done, or with a deliberate exit from the lock, part of the stake is charged to whatever is on file — after you have had the chance to contest it.

• It is optional. CtrlAltMove works exactly the same without a stake. You will never find one pre-checked, recurring, or set as a default. Every stake is a fresh tap, with the amount on the button.
• It buys nothing. A stake is not a purchase and unlocks no feature. It is a cost you set for yourself, in a calm moment, to bind the tired one.
• It is for adults. You confirm you are 18 or older before every stake. Your birth year stays on your phone; we store only that you made the confirmation.
• It is part of Pro. The Sunday planner is a Pro feature, and stakes attach to a week planned there as Committed. A Flexible week cannot be staked, because it makes no promise to break.
• It is charged only on forfeit. No authorization holds, no upfront charges, nothing sitting on your statement all week.
• It is funded by a US bank account or a card. A bank account is preferred: Stripe's fee on a $10 forfeit is about 8¢ by bank debit and about 59¢ by card, and the fee comes off the top of every forfeit. You link either on Stripe's own page. For a bank account, Stripe verifies it instantly when you sign in to your bank on Stripe's page, and collects its debit authorization there; you can relink at any time to switch.
• Your bank and card details go to Stripe, never to us. Lifesaver Labs stores a Stripe customer id, the stake ledger, and enough to show you what is on file — the bank name and last four digits, or the card brand, last four digits, and expiry month and year — nothing more.

Amounts: $5 to $50 in whole dollars for a week, default $10. A larger, fixed-term season stake is separate and optional too. Within 24 hours of placing any stake you can cancel it from the stake card, free, no reason asked.

What forfeits, and what never does

Only two things forfeit: nothing done, or a deliberate exit. In the app's own terms, a staked deadline forfeits when your phone recorded that it ended as:

• a miss — the deadline passed with the rule never met;
• a waited-out lock — you chose to wait the lock out rather than move;
• an emergency unlock where you gave the reason I chose to or no time.

Everything else settles as kept, and costs nothing:

• any deadline you met, by any route;
• a deferral from your budget — moving a deadline to tomorrow is planning, not skipping;
• an emergency unlock for rested, unwell, or gym closed;
• an emergency unlock you never gave a reason for;
• a deadline inside a paused day — including a travel pause you add after staking;
• a deadline inside a support disarm — when the CtrlAltMove Team turns your locks off for you, the whole week's stake is waived outright;
• any deadline the app could not see — no record means no charge.

The server has no opinion of its own about whether you moved. It charges only what your own phone wrote down. When in doubt, no charge.

How and when a week is judged

Which deadlines count. A week's stake binds to the plan as it stood when you placed it. A deadline counts if it is due at least 24 hours after you placed the stake, is not inside a paused day, and is not inside a support disarm. Removing a deadline from your plan after staking does not remove it from the stake — but a removed deadline has no record, so it can never cost you anything; it simply settles as kept.

The pro-rating. The forfeit is the stake multiplied by the share of counted deadlines that forfeited, rounded up to the cent, at least 50¢ when anything forfeited, and $0 when nothing did or nothing counted.

When. Times are in UTC; the server does not know anyone's time zone. A week ends at midnight UTC on Monday. It is judged no earlier than 36 hours after that, and only once every counted deadline has a record. If anything is still unresolved, judgement waits, but no later than 7 days and 36 hours after the week ended, at which point anything still unresolved settles as kept.

The window to say no. If the forfeit is $0 the stake closes as kept and you hear nothing but the good news. If anything forfeited, the judgement is sent to your phone and a contest window opens: 48 hours when the app can notify you, 7 days when it cannot. Nobody is charged for a notice they could not have seen. Only after the window passes with no contest, no cancellation, and every check below still true is the bank account or card charged. A Stripe receipt is emailed for every charge, and every stake's state is visible in the app while it is live and in History afterwards.

Before any charge, all of these must hold, checked at the moment of charging, not earlier: your phone recorded a forfeiting outcome · the week is bound to a plan you committed · you have not cancelled · the window has passed · no contest is open · your bank or card consent is on file · the caps below allow it · staking is switched on for everyone. Any doubt means no charge.

Caps. $50 per week stake, $200 per season stake, and never more than $250 charged in any rolling 30 days on one account, so that no bug can drain a card or a bank account. If a card charge is declined, or a bank debit is returned — insufficient funds, a closed account — it is retried once after 3 days and then the stake is voided: no debt, no collections, no fee.

Bank timing. A card charge succeeds or fails at once. A bank debit takes about 4 business days to settle; the stake shows as charging until it does, no Spotter share is set aside until then, and a return can arrive during those days — it then follows the one-retry rule above. A refund to a bank account takes a few days longer than one to a card.

Escalation (optional)

Off by default. If you turn it on in Settings → Stakes, the planner proposes a larger stake after a week in which anything forfeited: the amount doubles each time, up to $50. You still tap the amount every time, and you can always lower it — a lower tap becomes the new base.

The ladder resets to the base after two kept weeks in a row that were planned at the American Heart Association baseline — the planner's readout at the time you placed the stake. A kept week planned below the baseline leaves the count where it was; a forfeiting week starts it over. A week whose forfeit was waived does not climb the ladder.

An honesty note: the app knows what you planned and that every deadline was kept. It does not measure 150 minutes of moderate work. So the reset condition is "two kept weeks planned at the baseline", and never "you met the baseline".

The season stake

A second, larger, fixed-term stake, placed from Settings → Stakes or the season card at any point in a 12-week season. It overlaps the weekly stakes and is judged separately. $20 to $200 in whole dollars, default $50, one per season.

It is a stake on the ritual itself. The bar is 10 kept weeks out of 12, pro-rated to the weeks remaining when you place it. A week is kept when it had a Committed plan and no counted deadline forfeited. A week with no plan, or planned Flexible, is not kept — the consent sheet says so before you stake. Weeks entirely inside a pause or a support disarm are left out of both sides of the count.

The season is judged 36 hours after it ends, with the same unresolved rule, contest window, and checks as a week. The forfeit is the stake multiplied by the shortfall as a share of the bar, rounded up, at least 50¢ when short.

Cancelling a season stake takes effect 7 days after the tap. The cancel screen tells you the effective date and the worst-case amount before you confirm. The stake is then judged on the weeks that elapsed, against a bar pro-rated to those weeks, and nothing can be charged after the effective date plus its contest window. A season stake cancelled within 24 hours of placing it is released outright.

Cancelling

• Week stakes. Stakes never recur, so cancelling stops every future stake immediately. The current week's stake stands to its end — once a week is locked in, its stake stays until Sunday — unless it is still in its 24-hour cooling-off.
• Season stake. As above: effective 7 days after the tap, with the date and worst case shown first.
• Everything. Settings → Stakes → Stop staking, or an email to support@ctrlaltmove.com. Cancellation is one screen; it is never a phone call or a form.
• Deleting your account cancels every open stake and deletes your Stripe customer. The stake ledger is kept seven years as a financial record, detached from your account (see the privacy policy). A share owed to a Spotter from a charge that already happened still pays out on its schedule; nothing new is ever charged.

After a cancellation, the server refuses to charge anything whose effective date has passed, whatever state it was in.

Contesting, refunds, and disputes

We would rather waive a charge than argue about one. Here is what that means for you.

• Contest with one tap, in the app. When a judgement arrives you can say the app did not see my workout, I was unwell or it was an emergency, the gym was closed, or something else in your own words.
• Your first contest is waived automatically. The first contest in any rolling 84 days is granted, no questions asked. Later ones go to a person for review.
• Silence never charges. If a contest under review hears nothing back within 7 days, it is waived. The outcome is written to the stake record you can see.
• Refunds within 60 days, no questions. Tap This charge was wrong on the stake card, or email us, and the charge is refunded. After two refunds in 84 days we stop taking your money: staking is suspended for your account rather than argued over.
• Chargebacks are never contested. If you dispute a charge with your bank we concede it, waive every open stake, and turn staking off for your account.
• A support disarm is relief. If the CtrlAltMove Team turns your locks off for you, that week's stake is waived outright. A disarm never leaves a charge behind.
• You can always see the state. The stake card on Home while a stake is live; History → Stakes for every settlement and its reason; a Stripe receipt by email for every charge.
• The record is kept. Every stake keeps the plan it was bound to, the outcomes at judgement, every change of state with its time, the terms version you agreed to, and the text of any contest — so a question about a charge can always be answered from what happened, not from memory.

Where the money goes

Unless you choose to send part of a forfeit to your Spotters, forfeits are revenue of Lifesaver Labs, a public benefit corporation. Lifesaver Labs is not a charity, and a forfeit is not a donation. Forfeits are earmarked for public-health initiatives such as Neighbor 911 — which, if it works, will spend much of its effort rescuing people from the outcomes of the lifestyle diseases that inactivity feeds: obesity, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease. Forfeits are never spent on CtrlAltMove's own budget.

Stripe's processing fee is paid from the forfeit before any split — it is a cost of the charge, not of the initiatives. Whatever you choose below, Lifesaver Labs keeps at least $1 of every forfeit (or all of a forfeit that leaves less than $1 after the fee), and Lifesaver Labs pays Stripe's Connect account fees for the Spotters who receive shares.

We benefit when you skip, and we would rather you did not. We would rather you keep it. The ledger below is public so you can hold us to that.

Paying your Spotters instead

You can choose to send part of each forfeit to your Spotters — the people you have asked to watch your deadlines — rather than all of it to Lifesaver Labs. A slider in Settings → Stakes → Where forfeits go sets how much: from 0 %, the default, in which everything after Stripe's fee funds Neighbor 911 and Lifesaver Labs' other public-health work, up to 80 %, in 5 % steps. Whatever you choose, the remainder always goes to Neighbor 911 and the other initiatives. As you move the slider it shows you what a $10 forfeit would split into, after Stripe's fee. The share is stamped on each stake when you place it; changing it affects only stakes placed afterwards, and the consent sheet for every stake states the share you chose.

The split. Fees come first. Stripe's processing fee is taken from the forfeit — the fee Stripe actually reports for the charge, which depends on what is on file, or, until it has, the published rate for that rail: 0.8 %, capped at $5, for a bank debit; 2.9 % + 30¢ for a card — rounded up to the cent. Of what is left, Lifesaver Labs keeps at least $1 (or all of it, when less than $1 is left). Your chosen percentage of that net amount, rounded down to the cent and capped so that the $1 stays, is divided equally in whole cents among the Spotters who can receive it. The rest, plus any cent left over from the division, goes to Lifesaver Labs' public-health initiatives as above. A small forfeit can therefore leave nothing for your Spotters, as the third row shows. The table uses the published card rate; the smaller table after it shows what each rail costs.

Who receives. Who receives is settled when the charge happens, among your Spotters then — not when you placed the stake, and not when the week was judged. A Spotter receives a share if, at that moment, they are on your Spotter roster or in one of your Spotter groups (counted once, however many groups they are in), they have opted in to receiving shares, their Stripe recipient account can receive transfers, and they have not declined. You are never counted, even if you are a member of your own Spotter group. If none of your Spotters can receive, 100 % goes to Lifesaver Labs — and the stake card told you so when you placed the stake ("none of your Spotters can receive yet"). The planner shows how many of your Spotters can receive today.

When a share is paid. A share matures 60 days after the charge — the same 60 days in which you can have the charge refunded, no questions asked. A refund before then cancels the share, and a chargeback after a share has been paid out reverses the transfer where Stripe can. Matured shares accrue per Spotter and are paid out on the cadence the Spotter chooses — quarterly (the default: January, April, July, and October) or yearly (January only, which keeps Stripe's per-account fee to at most one month a year) — and only when the Spotter's transferable balance is $10.00 or more. The transferable balance is what has accrued minus Stripe's payout fee of 0.25 % + 25¢, which is taken from the payout itself, so that the fee never eats a small share. A transferable balance of $10.00 or more never waits longer than 180 days on the quarterly cadence, or 365 days on the yearly one, from its oldest matured share: past that, it is paid at the next daily run, whatever the month. Switching to quarterly never delays a payout that is already due. A balance still under $10.00 twelve months after its oldest share goes to the public-health fund instead, and every share notice a Spotter receives tells them so. If a Spotter opts out or deletes their account, the same $10.00 rule is applied at once. A Spotter's earned share is the one thing Lifesaver Labs holds for anyone, and it is held for a bounded time only. A matured share whose Spotter still cannot receive it 90 days after it matured reverts to Lifesaver Labs and is logged as such.

Why fees come first. Stripe charges a fee on every charge, a fee on every payout to a Spotter, and a monthly fee for every Spotter account that receives one. Taking the split from the charged amount, before those fees, meant the typical forfeit cost Lifesaver Labs more than it kept, and very small forfeits lost money on the card fee alone. So the split is of what is left after Stripe's fee, Lifesaver Labs keeps at least $1 of every forfeit, and Spotters are paid a few times a year from $10.00 rather than every month from every share. On a $10 forfeit at the 80 % setting, about $1.89 stays with the public-health initiatives before tax. The rules are set so that a forfeit is never a loss for the initiatives — the $1 always stays — and so that a Spotter's share is never quietly eaten by a fee.

The Spotter's side. Nobody receives a share without asking to. A Spotter opts in from their own Spotters screen — Receive stake shares — and completes Stripe's identity check on Stripe's own pages; their identity and bank details go to Stripe, never to us. Stripe files a 1099-K for recipients above the reporting thresholds. A Spotter can choose Never receive shares instead, or opt out later: shares already matured stay theirs, under the same $10.00 rule above, and no new ones are created. A Spotter is told of a share when it matures, not when you are charged, with the amount and whose stake it was — so a share cancelled by a refund is a share nobody was ever told about, and no notice is ever false. A Spotter who could not receive is told nothing.

Read this before you choose it. Your Spotters gain when you skip — choose this only if that is the pressure you want. Spotting is a support role, and paying a supporter when you fail is a conflict we would rather name than hide.

What does not change. Your Spotters have no say in any judgement, contest, or refund: those run exactly as described above, automatically, whoever the money is going to. Sending part of a forfeit to your Spotters changes nothing about what forfeits, when a week is judged, the window to say no, the caps, or the checks made before any charge. It changes only where the money goes after a charge that would have happened anyway.

Ledger

Updated quarterly: everything forfeited, everything refunded, everything paid to Spotters, and what the difference funded after Stripe's fees.

Why we offer this at all

Because in the exercise-adherence literature, a self-funded commitment contract is the one thing with a multi-year effect — and because only a minority of people want one, which is why it is optional and why onboarding never asks for a card or an amount. The studies, and what they do not show, are on the sources page.

Contact

Questions about a stake, a charge, or these terms: support@ctrlaltmove.com. Put STAKE in the subject; we aim to respond within two business days, sooner for anything lock-related. How your bank, card, and stake data are handled is in the privacy policy.