Paid placement: the terms

These are the terms for a paid listing on The Cusp — on the moving and storage pages, and on the pages about lawyers, therapists, money and mortgages. They are published here rather than emailed, because a reader is entitled to see what an advertiser agreed to as easily as the advertiser is.

This is one page and it is the whole agreement. If something matters, it is here. If it is not here, it is not a rule, and we will not invent one later and apply it to somebody.

Section 1

What a listing is, and how it is billed

A labeled placement carrying the company name, its location, its federal authority type, its USDOT number, and a discount code behind a one-tap reveal.

What a listing costs. $49 a month. $490 for a year, paid once. $440 for the first year for a founding advertiser starting before 31 December 2026, and $490 a year after that.

The arithmetic, since a discount stated as a saving is usually a flattered one. Twelve months at $49 is $588. The annual rate saves $98, which is exactly two months. The founding rate saves $148, which is three months and a dollar. It is the same listing on the same terms either way — paying for a year does not buy a better placement, because there is no better placement to buy.

Canceling. Cancel any time. The listing runs to the end of the period already paid for, the month or the year, and nothing further is charged. Nothing is refunded because nothing is taken away.

Why an annual rate exists now, when this page used to argue against one. It used to say we billed monthly so that ending a listing could never cost an advertiser more than a month — because section 5 lets a listing end on a reader report, and that decision should never be about money. That reasoning still stands. What changed is where the protection sits. The list of things that end a listing is closed and published; most of it carries seven days to put right; the rest carries 48 hours to answer. No listing ends over something the company was not told about in advance, and money is forfeit only for something it agreed in writing not to do. The protection is notice now, rather than small stakes.

Section 2

The one thing we check

Before a listing goes up we confirm that the USDOT number holds active federal household goods authority, and — if that authority is a broker’s rather than a carrier’s — that the company’s own homepage carries the disclosure 49 CFR § 371.107(c) requires: that it is a household goods broker, that it will not transport the shipper’s goods, and that it will arrange transport by an FMCSA-authorized carrier.

For a licensed profession — a lawyer, a therapist, a financial planner, a mortgage broker or loan originator — the check is the license. We confirm it with the body that issued it, that it is active on the day we look, and that the name on it is the name on the advertisement. Where a license carries a public disciplinary record we read it. That is all we confirm, and it is the same check the professional directory runs.

That is the entire check. It takes about a minute, it is identical for every applicant in a category, and for movers it is the same check we teach readers to run on this page. A company that fails it does not go up, whatever it offers to pay. A company that fixes its homepage can reapply.

We re-run it while a listing is live. Authority lapses. Disclosures come off in a redesign. Section 5.1 covers what happens then.

Section 3

The discount code

A code is rejected unless all five are true.

• It is money off the move, not off something already free. A free estimate is not a discount — federal rules already entitle a shipper to one.
• It works on a telephone call, not only on a website. Most moving quotes happen on the phone.
• It does not expire before the listing does.
• It carries no minimum that excludes a small move. The move at the start of a separation is usually one bedroom, sometimes a car.
• It is not a code already published on coupon sites. If a reader can find it in three seconds on a search engine, the listing gave them nothing.

What we can and cannot count, since it would be easy to imply more. We can tell an advertiser how many readers revealed their code. We cannot tell them how many used it, because we never touch the transaction. Their own redemption count is the real number.

We send the reveal count every month, without being asked. Not on request and not at renewal — monthly, including the months when the number is small or nothing at all. An advertiser who has paid for a year is entitled to watch it move rather than hear about it once at the end, and a small number reported honestly is worth more to both of us than a good one reported late.

Section 4

What an advertisement may not contain

One format, one price, and the category changes only which pages your listing appears on. There is no premium category, no larger unit and no better position, because there is no better position — the strip rotates. A lawyer pays what a moving company pays.

Buying a listing never puts you in the professional directory, in a ranked result, or on a badge. Those are ordered by things you cannot buy, and a paid listing sits outside all of them. If you are in the directory already, you are there free, and paying us does not move you.

You warrant that your advertisement complies with the advertising rules of your own profession. We publish it; you are the advertiser. We do not read your bar, board or regulator’s rules for you and we do not approve copy as compliant.

No testimonials, endorsements, outcome claims or superlatives, in any category. No “best”, no “top-rated”, no client quotes, no results, no success rates, no awards we cannot check. This is stricter than most professions require, and it is deliberate: a format that cannot carry a claim never has to be policed for one.

No rates, APRs, payment amounts, terms or fee figures in a mortgage or lending advertisement. Stating any of those in an advertisement pulls a set of federally required disclosures in behind it. We are not going to referee that, so the format does not accept the numbers at all. Describe what you do; quote a person when they call you.

Nothing that reads as legal, medical, tax or investment advice, and nothing addressed to a named individual. An advertisement says who you are and what you do.

We are paid a flat fee for a period of time. We are not paid per lead, per click, per call, per matched client or per case, and we take no share of anything you earn. That is what makes this advertising rather than a referral arrangement, and we will not take money on any other basis.

Section 5

What an advertiser may not say about us

An advertiser may not describe a listing as a verification, an endorsement, an approval, a certification or a recommendation. They are not vetted. They bought an advertisement.

Specifically they may not use the words Cusp Verified, Cusp Approved or Cusp Certified, or any wording a reasonable person would read as meaning we checked them out. The Cusp Verified mark belongs to a different program with a real standard, and it is not for sale at any price.

They may say, accurately: “Advertiser on The Cusp.”

Section 6

What ends a listing

This is a closed list. These are the violations. A company that does none of them does not lose its listing for cause.

5.1 — things we can check ourselves

• Federal authority lapses, is revoked, or goes out of service.
• A broker’s homepage stops carrying the § 371.107(c) disclosure.
• The discount code stops working, or turns out to breach one of the five rules above.

Seven days to fix any of these. Fixed in seven days, nothing happens. Not fixed, the listing ends. These are things a company may not know have happened, usually after a website change, so notice is only fair.

5.2 — things a reader tells us

Each is a specific named act. A report has to allege one of them.

• Holding a shipment for a payment above the estimate — a hostage load.
• A price at pickup or delivery materially above the written estimate, absent a change the customer asked for in writing.
• Taking a deposit and not performing the move, or not returning it.
• A carrier arriving under a different company name than the reader was told to expect, where that was not disclosed in advance.
• Refusing to give a shipper the list of carriers a broker uses. 49 CFR § 371.109 requires it.
• Telling a reader they are a carrier when their authority is a broker’s.
• Dishonoring the discount code the reader came with.
• Retaliating against a reader who complained — to us, to a regulator, or publicly.

We tell the company what was alleged and they have 48 hours to respond. We read what they send. Then we decide, and the decision is ours.

Forty-eight hours and not longer, because the reader is in the middle of a move and cannot wait — and because a company that cannot answer in two days will not answer in ten.

5.3 — the narrow catch-all, stated honestly

We reserve the right to end a listing for conduct toward a reader of the same seriousness as the acts in 5.2, that we did not anticipate. We tell the company exactly what it was.

This exists because a closed list will eventually miss something, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. It is not a general discretion. If we ever use it, the conduct is added to 5.2 by name so the next advertiser is told in advance — described as a type of act, never as an incident, and never with a company attached to it.

Section 7

What happens to the money

A listing that ends under 5.1 after the seven days have run, or under 5.2 or 5.3: the balance is forfeit. Whatever has been paid for and not yet used is not returned. These are violations of terms agreed in advance, named on this page, with notice on everything we could give notice on.

On a year that is real money, so here it is in figures rather than in principle. A founding advertiser removed in the second month of a $440 year forfeits the ten months left. We would rather an advertiser read that sentence now and decide against the annual rate than read it for the first time in an email from us.

A company that cancels keeps its listing to the end of the period already paid for — a month, or a year. It is simply not billed again. Nothing is refunded because nothing was taken away: it bought a year and it gets the year.

An arrangement we end for our own reasons — our own change of mind, and nothing the company did — runs the same way. The listing stays up to the end of the period already paid for. We do not cut a paid term short for our own convenience.

Nobody is invoiced again after a listing ends. There is no termination fee, no liquidated damages and no further claim.

Section 8

What we will not do to an advertiser

• We will not sell a competitor a better position. There are no positions. The strip is unranked and ranking is not for sale at any price.
• We will not use a complaint as leverage to sell anybody anything.
• We will not quietly stop showing a listing. If it is off, they were told why.
• We will not change these terms mid-month. Changes apply from the next billing date, announced before it.
• We will not cut a paid term short for our own convenience. If we stop selling placements, or change our mind about carrying them at all, the listings already paid for run to the end of their term.
• We will not pass an advertiser’s details, or any reader’s details, to anybody.

Section 9

A listing ending is not a verdict

• We do not publish a list of removed advertisers, and we will not start one.
• We do not tell the reader who complained what happened, beyond that we acted.
• We do not tell competitors, other advertisers, or anybody else.
• We do not report a company to FMCSA, a state regulator, a trade body or the Better Business Bureau.
• The company stays in our public directory of federally authorized movers, unchanged. That list is built from the government’s own authority file and has nothing to do with who advertises. Only the advertisement goes.

A listing that ends simply stops appearing. We are removing an advertisement, not issuing a verdict, and we are not going to dress up the first thing as the second.

Section 10

What is not covered here

Everything about how a move is conducted is between the company and its customer. We are not a party to it, we take no commission on it, we do not arrange it, and we have no contractual relationship with a reader on an advertiser’s behalf.

What a listing costs is in section 1 of this page. It did not use to be: this page said there was no honest number to put on a rate card yet, and that was true when it was written. There is a number now, and it is published rather than quoted privately — which is the part that matters, because a price given out one call at a time is a price that ends up different for different people for the same listing.

A first payment is agreement to this page. If a term here is unacceptable, say so before paying rather than after. We would rather lose an advertiser at the start than argue with one in the middle. Questions go to hello@thecusp.app.

Section 11

Featured placement, and the county caps

A Featured placement puts a listing at the top of its county section on a state directory page, above the listings that did not pay. Everything else about the listing is unchanged.

It is not a credential, not a badge and not an endorsement. Paying does not get a listing verified, does not change what its licence check says, and does not put anybody on the page who could not qualify to be there for free. Money buys a position. It never buys entry.

The caps

• Three Featured placements per county for attorneys, mediators, CDFAs and therapists.
• Two per county for moving and storage companies.
• Expanded profiles are capped at half of that county’s listings, minimum two. A county page where most listings are paid reads as a paid directory even when the ordering is honest — and the ordering being honest is the whole basis of this site. Half is a ceiling, not a target.

When a county is full, it is full, at any price. There is no tier that buys past a cap, and no exception for a larger firm, a longer term or a bigger payment. The waitlist runs in the order enquiries arrived, and nothing moves a company up it.

Which county a listing belongs to

One county per listing, and it is the county of the published office address — not the service area. Every firm serves the whole state. If service area decided the county, every firm would appear in every county, the caps would mean nothing, and this would become the pay-to-play directory the site exists as an alternative to.

• A company with genuine offices in two counties may hold a placement in both, as two listings, each counting separately against that county’s cap and each charged separately.
• A virtual office or a mail drop is not an office. A suite number shared with fifty other businesses does not count.

How it is labelled

Every listing whose position was bought carries the words PAID PLACEMENT, inline with the listing name, always visible. Never “Sponsored”, “Partner” or “Premier”; never a star or a ribbon; never a footer, a legend, a hover or a footnote. “Featured” is what we sell. “Paid” is what the reader needs to know, and the label uses the reader’s word.

The label is real text in the page, written by the server. It is never drawn by JavaScript and never an image. A paid position that can appear without its label is worse than having no paid positions at all, and a label that depends on a script is a label that can go missing. The label must also still read as a label with every stylesheet switched off. That means a real space in the markup between the listing name and the label, and the word “Paid” carried in the text rather than produced by a style rule. Spacing and capitals that exist only in CSS are spacing and capitals that can vanish.

Why this clause is here. On 12 September 2026 our developer found this exact fault in the app build: the label was being delivered correctly, but the gap before it came from a CSS margin rather than from a space in the markup. Where the stylesheet did not reach, a listing rendered as “Living With Mom and Living With DadPaid”. The label was present and had stopped being a label. It is fixed, there are tests holding it that way, and the rule is written down here so that it is a term rather than a memory.

Expanded profiles do not carry the label. They buy more room to describe yourself, in the same position an unpaid listing would occupy. If an expanded profile ever affects ordering, it gets the label the same day.

Above any county section containing a Featured placement, this line appears, always visible: “Paid placements appear first and are labelled. Everything below them is ordered the same way for everyone.” It appears once per county section rather than once per page, because each county section is its own ordered list.

When a placement ends

The cancellation rule in section 1 applies unchanged: a placement runs to the end of the period already paid for, and nothing further is charged. A year was bought and a year is delivered.

• At the end of that period the listing returns to its ordinary position, alphabetically within its county, and the PAID PLACEMENT label comes off with it. The listing itself stays — it was free before the placement and it is free after.
• The county slot reopens at the same moment, and the first company on that county’s waitlist is offered it.
• A placement we end for our own reasons runs the same way, to the end of the paid period.

Only two things end a placement early with the unused period refunded: the credential lapses, or the listing was obtained by misstatement — a claimed office that does not exist, a credential that was never held. Nothing else. Not a complaint, not a competitor’s objection, and not a change of mind on our side about a company we still believe qualifies.

Section 12

More than one county, and whole states

A moving company may buy additional counties, and whole states. A professional listed in the directory may not.

The reason is not favouritism. An attorney’s county is a fact about where they sit; a moving company’s county is a fact about where it drives. Every firm in the state will tell you it serves the whole state. A carrier holding active federal household goods authority actually does, and that authority is a public record we already check under section 2. Service area is a real thing for a mover and a claim for a lawyer, and that single difference is why one can buy across county lines and the other cannot.

What it costs. Each additional county is $490 a year, the same as the first. There is no volume rate. The price does not fall because more of it is bought, for the same reason the cap does not move: nothing here is supposed to be cheaper for being bigger.

Statewide is every county in the state, capped at eight counties’ worth — $3,920 a year. Delaware has three counties, so statewide there is $1,470. Connecticut has eight, so it is $3,920. Texas has 254, and statewide is still $3,920. It is one rule rather than a per-county multiplication, because a per-county multiplication stops being honest somewhere around Texas.

What buying a state does not buy. The cap does not move. Two moving companies per county, statewide or not — buying the state buys two slots in each of its counties, not exclusivity, and not a third slot anywhere. Sections 4 to 9 apply to each county separately: a listing that ends in one county under section 6 ends in that county, and the rest run on.

One price for a county placement. A Featured placement in the professional directory is also $490 a year. They are different products on different pages, and there is no reason for them to carry different numbers. Two figures nine dollars apart for the same shape of thing tells a reader nothing except that nobody checked.

Keep reading

• How we make money — every stream, including this one
• How the directory is ordered, and what cannot be bought
• Will the company you called actually move you?
• Every federally authorized moving company, by state