How tibbi is funded and what it costs you
Version 1.0 · last updated 27 July 2026. Somewhere in this product you will open a reward box with a business's name on it. You are entitled to know that the business paid to put its name there, what it paid for, and — more to the point — what it did not buy.
What it costs you: nothing, and there is no way to change that
- No deposit. There is no payment endpoint anywhere in the service, no card field, no in-app purchase and no promo code that turns money into tokens.
- No subscription and no premium tier. Every part of the product works the same for everybody, and nothing is held back behind a payment.
- Tokens cannot be bought. New tokens come from completing a lesson and reaching a fixed Showdown milestone. That is the whole list; there is no top-up, gift or transfer.
- Tokens cannot be cashed out, transferred or refunded. They have no monetary value, so there is nothing to sell you and nothing to owe you.
- Your attention is not sold. No advertising network, no trackers, no audience segments, no data sold to anyone for any price.
- Leaving costs nothing. Delete the account whenever you like, with no retention screen and no offer to keep you.
These are constraints in the build with a check that runs before every release, not commitments in a document. How that verification works.
Where the money comes from
Two sources, kept apart on purpose. Follow each one from its origin to the part of the product it is allowed to touch.
1 · A grant from the ACT Gambling and Racing Commission
Where it starts. The Gambling Harm Prevention and Mitigation Fund is money levied on gaming machine licensees in the ACT and directed back into preventing and reducing gambling harm. Put plainly: it comes from the losses of people who gambled in ACT venues.
What it pays for here. The learning videos and their captions, the quiz bank, the simulated betting screen and its transparency panel, the life simulation and its risk warnings, the cooldown, the support and referral layer, the measurement and the pilot reporting, and the clinical review hours that sign the sensitive content off.
What it does not pay for. Sponsored reward boxes and the challenge system. Both sit outside the funded scope, on separate books.
2 · A placement fee paid by a sponsor
Where it starts. A local business — a grocer, a café, a community organisation — pays a fixed fee to place a branded reward box for a period. The fee is for the placement itself. It does not vary with what anybody does inside the product.
What it pays for. The rewards in that sponsor's own boxes, and the cost of running the sponsorship layer. Nothing else.
What it does not pay for. Any part of the learning, the betting simulation, the cooldown or the support layer. Not one hour of the clinical review. Not the helpline panel.
The wall: a sponsor buys reach, never people
This is the part that matters most, because a business that has paid to reach an audience selected for gambling vulnerability has an obvious interest in knowing who is in it. It cannot find out. Not by asking, not by paying more, not with a data-sharing agreement.
| What a sponsor can see | What a sponsor can never see | Why it holds |
|---|---|---|
| How many times its own box was opened, in total, over its own campaign period. | Who opened it. No name, no email, no display name, no account identifier, no device identifier. | No such field exists in the sponsor view |
| Which rewards from its own box were given out, as counts. | One person's behaviour, in any form, at any level of detail. | Aggregate only, built in |
| Aggregate figures for its own campaign only. | Anything about another sponsor's campaign, or the product as a whole. | Scoped to the campaign |
| Figures for a group only once that group has at least ten people in it. | A group so small that a person could be identified by working backwards. | Minimum group size of 10 |
| Nothing at all about betting, losses, cooldown, stress or lesson results. | Any signal of risk, harm or vulnerability, aggregated or otherwise. | Never leaves the product |
There is no targeting. A sponsor cannot ask for its box to be shown to people who bet more, who lost more, who are close to a cooldown, or who are in any other state. Boxes are placed against the product, not against people. The privacy policy sets out the same wall from the data side.
Why the sponsored parts are kept outside the funded scope
Public money for harm prevention should not end up buying branded prize boxes, and the funder's own rules say so: projects primarily involved with prizes and competitions are excluded, as is any commercial activity run for private profit. Rather than argue about where the line falls, we drew it ourselves and put it on a public page.
- Declared out of scope in the funding application: sponsored reward boxes, the challenge system, and the later integrated companion.
- Separate books. Grant spending is recorded against its own budget lines and acquitted on its own. Sponsorship income and spending never share a ledger with it. Mixing the two would make the acquittal impossible, which is the practical reason this is not negotiable.
- No grant money buys a brand box. No sponsor money reaches the learning, the betting simulation, the cooldown or the support layer.
- Assets built with grant money belong to the operating entity, not to any individual, and revenue that arrives after the funded term is put back into running the service.
If the sponsorship layer disappeared tomorrow, everything the grant paid for would keep working exactly as it does now. That is the test we hold it to.
The honest version of the tension
A harm prevention tool that hands out branded prize boxes is, on its face, uncomfortable — and the discomfort is legitimate, because the box borrows the same anticipation the betting screen is teaching you to distrust. Three things hold it in place: a box is opened only with tokens earned from completed lessons or fixed Showdown milestones and can never be bought, the odds inside it are published before you open it, and nothing in it can be converted back into a stake. If a box ever fails those tests, the box goes, not the test.
Money we will not take
- Money from a bookmaker, a wagering operator, a casino or a gaming machine manufacturer, in any form, including sponsorship and research funding.
- Affiliate or referral commission of any kind. There is nowhere to refer you to.
- Advertising revenue. There is no ad inventory in the product.
- Payment for placing a real brand inside a lesson, a quiz question or a risk warning. Educational content is not for sale.
- Anything conditional on softening what a lesson says.
What a sponsor is allowed to influence
The look of its own box and the rewards inside it, within rules it does not write. That is the complete list. It has no say over lesson content, quiz questions, risk-warning facts, the odds shown, the token rates, the cooldown, or the wording of the support panel — and no route to raise any of it beyond declining to sponsor again.
What we report, and to whom
The funder receives aggregated reporting on a schedule and a final report after the pilot closes, including the results that do not flatter us. Sponsors receive campaign counts only. Neither receives anything that could be traced to a person. What happens at the end of the pilot.
Questions about the money
Ask us, and take it to the funder if the answer is unsatisfactory — both routes are on the contact page, and using either has no effect on your access.