FreeBattle.lol is a public leaderboard of products. Anyone can add an entry, anyone can vote on any entry, and the rank is the difference between the thumbs up and the thumbs down. Adding costs nothing and voting costs nothing, because a board where votes cost money is not a board, it is an auction.
Pay-to-rank boards work, briefly and well: the money is real, the leaderboard is honest about what it measures, and the first day is spectacular. Then the top position reaches a number nobody will beat, the bidding stops, and the board freezes with whoever had the deepest pocket sitting on it. What is left is an expensive advertisement that calls itself a ranking.
A vote has a different failure mode, and we would rather have that one. It can be gamed, and we say exactly how well we defend against it in the rules. But nobody can end the game by writing a large enough cheque, so the top of the board keeps moving.
Ten sponsor cards, five in each column, sold at a flat $199 a month and shown on every page. They never touch the ranking and they never will: an advertiser buys attention next to the board, not a place on it. If you want one, see advertise.
Two things of our own. An anonymous identifier in a cookie, so your vote sticks to you across a reload. And a salted hash of your IP address, used only to cap how fast votes and submissions can arrive from one place: no raw IP address is ever written down here. No account, no email address, no name.
One thing that is not ours: Google Analytics runs on every page, so we can see how many people come and which pages they read. It sets its own cookies and it sends your IP address to Google, which is a real cost and worth stating plainly rather than burying. Your browser's Do Not Track setting, an ad blocker or a privacy extension all stop it, and nothing on the board depends on it: voting and submitting work exactly the same with it blocked.
When an entry is submitted, we read its page once: the meta description it already publishes, and its favicon. Both are stored here and served from here. That is why the icons beside each entry do not come from a favicon service: fifty of those on one page would hand your address to a third party fifty more times, on top of the once that Analytics already costs you.