Money moves visibility. It never moves the truth.
BTC Employers charges for two things: a verification review and a labeled spotlight placement. Neither purchase changes what the record says. This page draws the line explicitly so nobody has to take our word for it.
The firewall
"The badge is earned. The verification service is paid. Visibility can be purchased. Editorial truth cannot." That sentence is the whole policy. Everything below just spells out what it means in practice.
Two revenue lines exist on this index. Verification is a paid review of an employer's evidence, priced at 100,000 sats a year. Spotlight is a paid placement in a labeled promotional slot, priced at 100,000 sats per 30 days. Both are transactions for a service. Neither is a transaction for an opinion.
You can pay for
A scoped verification review of your own evidence. A Spotlight slot, always labeled as paid placement. Faster turnaround on a review already in queue.
You cannot pay for
Inclusion in the index. A positive finding. Removal of a true but unflattering fact. A higher rank, a better badge, or a shortcut past a Disputed flag.
Why paid review does not mean bought approval
An employer that pays for verification and fails it does not get a refund and does not get quiet treatment. It gets a record that says what evidence was missing, dated the day we looked. That outcome is the product working correctly, not a failure to monetize the relationship.
The same logic applies to Spotlight. Paying for a placement buys a labeled slot on the page, never a change to an employer's status, its signals, or its position in unpaid results. A Spotlight badge and a Verified badge answer different questions, and we do not let one stand in for the other.
Inclusion is free, and that is deliberate
Any employer that meets the bar for a signal can appear on the index whether or not it has ever paid us anything. Charging for inclusion would make the index a directory of customers rather than a record of employers, and the two are not the same product. See the methodology for exactly what evidence each signal requires.
Who decides, and how a dispute gets resolved
Editorial calls (what a signal requires, whether a piece of evidence qualifies, how a dispute resolves) are made against the written rules in the methodology, not against a customer's account status. A challenged claim moves to Disputed and stays there until the evidence settles it, regardless of whether the employer involved is a paying customer.
If revenue and accuracy ever conflict, accuracy wins, and the record shows it. A correction that costs us a paying customer still gets published, dated, on schedule.
How this is enforced
The people who review evidence do not set Spotlight pricing or manage sponsor accounts. Corrections and disputes run on the same public process for every employer, paying or not, described on the editorial policy page. If you think a paid relationship influenced a finding, that itself is a correction worth filing.