THE RULES
All of it, on one page.
Starvling is one mechanic and a promise. The mechanic is below in full, with the actual numbers the code uses. The promise is rule 6.
Everything starts with 48 hours
A new listing is a creature with 100 health. It loses 2.08 health an hour, every hour, with nothing you can do about it. Left alone it reaches zero in exactly 48 hours.
The clock is identical for every product on the board, including ours. There is no exception to buy.
Anyone can feed, once a day, free
One click adds 10 health, which is about 4.8 more hours of life. No account, no signup, no email. You will never be asked for one.
You can feed any one product once per day, and the day resets at midnight UTC. You can feed as many different products as you like. Health is capped at 100, so feeding something already full does nothing.
Roughly five people a day keeps a product alive
A creature loses 50 health a day and a feed is worth 10. So 5 feeds a day holds it steady, fewer and it slides towards death, more and it climbs the board.
That is the whole business model of attention, in one line. If you cannot find five people a day who care, the board will say so out loud, which is the point.
At zero it dies, in public, permanently
A creature at zero health is dead. It leaves the board, gets a tombstone in the graveyard showing how many days it lived and how many feeds it got in its life, and an epitaph it did not choose.
The graveyard is never cleaned. A directory that quietly deletes its failures is an advert, and the whole reason to trust the living half of this board is that the dead half is still there.
You can buy a second life, not a longer one
$9 brings a dead creature back with 50 health, about 24 hours, on the same link and the same page. It keeps its birthday, its lifetime feed count and its death record.
Then the same clock starts again at the same speed. Money bought it another chance to be fed, and nothing else. There is no discount and no bulk deal.
Rank is not for sale, and you can check
The board is ordered by feeds today, then by feeds in total, then by age. That is the entire formula. There is no fourth term and there is nowhere to put one, because price is not among the things being compared.
No paid placement, no sponsored rows, no boost, no "featured". The $9 listing fee buys a place on the board and never a position on it. Every number the ranking uses is published on the numbers page.
Questions people actually ask
Is feeding really free?
Yes, and it always will be. Feeders are the product's supply of attention. Charging them would be charging for the only thing that makes the ranking mean anything.
What stops someone feeding their own product a hundred times?
One feed per browser per product per day, enforced in the database. Clearing cookies or using another device gets around it, and we know that. We decided not to fight it with captchas or fingerprinting, because the cure is worse than the disease at this size and the fix would cost every honest feeder something.
Feeding your own product is allowed, once a day, like anyone else. It is one of the five you need.
What does the $9 actually buy?
A creature on the board with the clock above, a page anyone can feed, a share card that shows how close it is to dying, a click counter so you can see whether this sent you anyone, and a permanent grave if it starves. One payment, nothing renews.
What if nobody feeds mine?
It dies in about two days and its tombstone stays up with your product's name on it. That is not a bug and there is no refund for it. If that outcome would bother you, this is the wrong board, and we would rather say so before you pay than after.
Can I get a refund?
In one case: if you pay and your listing never appears within 24 hours, email hello@starvling.com and you get all of it back. That is a broken product. Dying is not.
Do you track me?
No. There is one random number in a cookie so the same browser cannot feed the same product twice in a day, and it is never joined to a name, an email or anything else. The privacy page has the detail.
Who decides what gets removed?
A person, by hand, and only for listings that are illegal, hateful, adult, or impersonating a product or person the lister does not represent. Use the report link in the footer. Removal is not refunded.