How it works

Six steps, repeated in public

Requests, backing, ranking, funding, building, releasing — every stage is visible as it happens, not summarised afterwards.

The cycle

From “we need this” to “everyone has it”

  1. 1

    Request

    Any member opens a request for software they need. Free to open, no token required.

  2. 2

    Back

    Members lock BONA against the requests they need. Locked, not spent — it comes back whenever they choose.

  3. 3

    Rank

    Requests are ranked quadratically, so a hundred people wanting something outweighs one person wanting it loudly.

  4. 4

    Fund

    A sale round opens for the top-ranked request: stated goal, fixed price, itemised budget, escrow and refund.

  5. 5

    Build & test

    BonaBuild builds it. Members run betas against real workloads; testers and bug reporters earn BONA.

  6. 6

    Release

    Free to every member on the same day — backers and non-backers alike. Backers’ BONA unlocks.

The roadmap

A hundred backers beat one whale

What gets built next is not a management decision. The ranking is quadratic — score is (Σ√c)² — which makes breadth of need count for more than depth of pockets. Drag the slider and watch it happen.

The same 10,000 BONA, two ways

One request backed by a single large holder; the other by a crowd splitting the identical amount.

Request A — one whale
score10,000
Request B — the crowd
score10,000

Backing is not buying

Backing locks BONA against a request — the tokens are never spent, transferred or burned. Nothing is paid, so there is nothing to refund.

Withdraw any time

In every request state, without anyone’s approval. The contract has no freeze, no sweep, and no function by which anyone can move a single locked token.

The honest weakness

Quadratic ranking can be gamed by splitting one holding across wallets. We count backing per member account, publish every backer count, and say so here rather than have it discovered.

So what stops you backing everything at once? Your balance. A token can sit behind one request or another, not both — and that choice is what makes the signal mean something. Opening a request is free and needs no BONA at all.

Membership

Open to everyone.
Not just companies.

Developers, freelancers, small businesses, students, tinkerers — you do not need to be a firm to join. A free account is the whole requirement: an email address, no fee, no token, no approval queue.

Download what you need and use it — for yourself, or commercially for your clients. Whatever you earn with it is 100% yours. What you may not do is resell or rebrand the software itself; you sell your own work, never the applications.

Applications open when the first software release is ready. Follow the channels in the footer to hear first.