Finders
Getting paid for finding things
What this actually is
Somebody loses a dog, a cat, a bike or a set of keys. They publish a listing on the map with a photo, the area it went missing in, and a reward they are offering. You are out anyway, you see the listing near your route, and if you are the one who spots it and gets it back to them, they pay you the reward directly, in person, in full.
That is the whole idea. You report a sighting on the pin if you see something, you message the owner through the app, and you arrange a handover with a one time code that you both confirm in person, so neither of you is handing a dog to the wrong stranger.
What it is not
- It is not a job and nobody pays you to walk. There is no hourly rate, no per-mile payment and no shift. Walking with the app open earns you nothing at all. The only money in it is a reward an owner has offered for a specific lost thing, and you get that by actually returning the thing.
- It is not passive income. Nothing accrues while your phone is in your pocket. There is no balance building up somewhere.
- There is no guaranteed income, and I am not going to imply one. Some weeks there will be nothing near you. Some listings will be found by somebody else an hour before you walk past. Some will never be found at all.
- It is occasional. Treat it as something that sometimes happens on a walk you were taking anyway, not as a thing you can plan around or budget with. If you need reliable money this week, this is the wrong page and I would rather say so than take your evening.
- Some people will not take the reward. People who hand a dog back sometimes refuse the money, and that is completely fine. The reward is there so that looking is worth a stranger's time, not because returning a pet ought to be a transaction.
The money, exactly
The reward on a listing is an offer from the owner to whoever brings their thing back. It is agreed and paid directly between the two of you, however you both want to do it. Cash at the door works. So does a bank transfer.
Bounty Go never holds that money and never takes a percentage of it. There is no wallet in the app, nothing to withdraw, and no cut on the way past. The honest cost of that arrangement is the obvious one: because the money never goes near the app, the app cannot guarantee anyone pays. What it does is remove suspicious listings and ban accounts that offer rewards they do not intend to pay. The deal itself belongs to the two people in it.
- Owner to finder
- The reward, paid in person, in full.
- Finder to Bounty Go
- Nothing, ever. Finding is free.
- Owner to Bounty Go
- Nothing. Posting a listing is free.
So nobody pays Bounty Go anything, on either side of a listing, and nobody has to sell you anything to look at the map.
Why it is still worth having on your phone
Because you are outside already. You walk the dog, you walk to work, you take the long way back from the shop, and none of that changes. Open the map before you set off and it shows you what has gone missing along the way. A search zone runs 300 m to 2.5 km in radius, which is the size of an ordinary walk rather than a search party.
The listing comes to you rather than you going looking for it, and that is the real difference from scrolling local groups. You do not have to remember a description from a post last Tuesday. It is on the map, near you, with the photo and the reward on it, while you are standing in the street where the animal actually is.
And when it does happen, the money is real. It is a person handing you cash on their doorstep because you brought their cat back, and it is theirs to give, not a platform's to approve. Some of the time it will be the best twenty minutes of somebody's year and you will be the reason.
What stops it being a magnet for scams
Anything that puts a cash reward next to a stranger's front door has to answer this, so here is the answer.
- Contact details stay private. You talk to the owner through the app. Neither of you has the other's phone number or address unless you both decide to share it.
- Handovers use a one time code. Both sides confirm the same code in person at the handover, so nobody can turn up first and claim something that is not theirs to collect.
- A listing's pin is deliberately offset from the real last-seen point, and only the owner sees the true one. Nobody can use the map to work out where a person lives.
- Report and block are always within reach. Report a listing, a message or the person you are dealing with, and block them from the claim or its chat. Blocking works immediately without waiting for anyone to review anything, and a human reads the reports.
- The app tells you to meet in public. Take someone with you if you would rather, and never send or accept money before the handover actually happens. A reward is paid when the thing is back with its owner, not before.
Bounty Go is not an emergency service, and nothing on this page is a promise that a stranger will behave well. Use the same judgement you would use selling a sofa to somebody from a classified ad, and use the report button early rather than late.
Where to get it
Bounty Go is on the App Store, with Google Play to follow. Installing, looking and posting are all free; the map shows what is lost near you and what each owner is offering, and the rest of this page is the honest version of what happens after you find something.
If the idea is worth your time, the Discord is where it gets built in the open: what is shipping, what broke this week, and which town the map should cover first. The release gets announced there before anywhere else, and the question of which streets it launches on is genuinely up for discussion.