Litter and debris removed from the visible path, tree line, and bank within frame.
Claim This Bounty iOS app in development · Summer 2026There's a place you love, and there's a mess wounding it. Scrubstake turns your care into a bounty. A hunter brings it in. The app pays out. The place gets better whether or not you had a free Saturday.
Photo, pin, prize. One line about what you want made right. The poster goes up as WANTED, and your money waits behind it.
A hunter claims the bounty first... an exclusive 24-hour lock, so nobody ever argues over who got there first. Then the scrub: gloves, bags, locked-frame photos before and after. Run out the clock and the bounty goes back up as WANTED.
An AI referee grades the proof pair against the spec. Pass, and the app pays out: the prize moves, the stamp lands, you get the proof. Hard calls go to a human, fast.
Nearly everyone loves some specific piece of the world... a park, a trail, the blocks around a school. Trash is a wound on something loved, and the care to fix it already exists in abundance. What's never existed is a mechanism for it. Scrubstake decouples care from labor: your love becomes a price, a hunter's work converts the price into the outcome, and the place gets better even when the people who love it are busy, elsewhere, or past their embankment-climbing years.
Donate to an institution and your hundred dollars goes everywhere except your park. A bounty stays exactly where your care lives: this path, this tree line, this corner.
Hunters win prizes for verified outcomes in a skill contest. No employer, no shifts, no pizza-party thank-yous. Hunters don't volunteer. They collect.
The wanted poster exists before any payout does, so "it was already clean" dies on arrival. Locked frames, GPS-bound, fresh capture only. Honesty is cheaper than fraud by design.
No grant cycle, no committee, no city blessing. You don't ask anyone before putting a price on a mess in a place you love. The commons, kept by a market small enough to see.
Funders speak the language of care and place. Hunters speak the language of bounties and competence. The wanted poster holds both at once: an act of caring that's also an invitation to get paid.
Loves a place and pays to keep it whole. Posts bounties on specific messes, or stakes a whole park, zip code, or trail and lets the work surface itself.
Claims bounties, does the scrub, collects prizes. Every bagged bounty is a notch on a record they own: proof pairs, earnings, history.
Finds qualifying work inside a staked place and takes the wanted photo. Spotters never hunt their own nominations... the proof always comes from someone who isn't paid for the cleanup.
Scopes every bounty into a checkable spec at posting, grades every proof pair at turn-in, and escalates anything uncertain to a human within 24 hours. The referee's verdict releases the prize.
Nobody has ever built a way to pay a stranger for a verified real-world result. Scrubstake starts with litter because litter is the simplest possible transformation a camera can grade... but Amazon started with books, and the machinery that proved itself on books became the company. The machinery underneath the bounty board doesn't care what it's verifying.
A referee's cut on every bounty, plus a flat posting fee. This layer's job is density, demonstration, and a growing corpus of verified proof.
Recurring commitments on places: a subscription that keeps a permanent price on a corner, or an area stake that keeps a whole park funded. The trash respawns; so does the bounty.
A business improvement district staking a downtown. A brand sponsoring a board of verified-impact content. B2B rents the referee system at scale.
The wedge is trash. The asset is a referee system that can verify any photographable change to the real world, plus the record of every verdict it has ever made.
Liability isn't handled with paperwork. It's handled with scope. Each rule deletes an entire category of trouble before it can exist, enforced automatically at posting time, before money attaches.
Gloves and bags. No tools means no injury claims.
No private land means no trespass claims.
18+ means no minor-labor regime, ever.
The path side of the curb. Full stop.
Bank and path, never the waterline.
Bounties target trash, never people, dwellings, belongings, vehicles, or memorials. Screened by the referee at posting, automatically, before a dollar moves.
The nomination and the hunt are separated, so manufactured messes never pay. The proof always comes from someone with no stake in the payout.
Scrubstake launches geofenced to New Haven, Connecticut. The first bounty is funded by the founder, in a park he actually loves, and the whole bet is whether one stranger claims it. That's a test you can't fake.
The referee system in development · iOS · Summer 2026 · New Haven first
We all hold a stake in this place. Claim yours by cleaning.