For Businesses
Sign up.
Get chosen.
Get a customer base of your own.
No waiting to be discovered. Sign up, verify, pledge jobs — and the pledgers of that town decide whether you get the lease.
[Image: Spice Tray corridor — cafés, pedestrians, stone buildings, no road]
The feedback loop
Demand puts you here. Demand keeps you here.
There is no application fee and no landlord to convince. The community signals what it wants, that signal decides who is eligible, and the same signal decides where you sit and whether you stay.
- 01
They tag you
Pledgers signal organically — tagging and pinning the places they want near them. You don't buy this. You earn it.
- 02
You appear in the graph
Those tags resolve into demand clusters: how many people want you, and precisely where.
- 03
You sign up
Entry is open — verify, pledge jobs, and you are in the pool. Nothing to wait out.
- 04
You compete
Your job pledge buys distribution to that town’s pledgers. It is only charged if you are selected — the distribution fee it earns is billed either way, after the raise closes. Rankings and job pledge strength decide the lease, 50/50.
- 05
You get placed
Your location is set by the spatial centroid of the pledgers who ranked you. Rent is a service fee indexed to square footage, identical everywhere — so there is no better corner to buy. You land among the people who asked for you.
- ↻
You re-earn it
Every December, stewards vote your lease. Serve well and it renews. Momentum carries forward for you too.
What your signal decides
Who opens
Any verified business can pledge, and pledger rankings decide which of them actually gets a lease.
What gets built
Architects submit under their own name, and pledgers rate every design. That rating is a term in the architect's design fee — the fee formula is brand-blind, not the submission.
How it's laid out
Spice Tray layouts are chosen by minimising the distance between cohort demand signal and the achievable building mix.
Where things sit
Placement inside the town runs on ranking proximity — what you ranked lands nearest to you.
Which doctors practise here
Your household signals the medical specialties you want in town — never by individual, so nobody's health history is exposed to build the roster. The clinic is staffed to a higher-than-national-average doctor-to-resident ratio, and that signal shapes what those doctors focus on.
Where you travel
Tea Leaves scouts hotel locations from organic social signal, then stewards ratify before any acquisition.
Who your neighbours are
Selection weighs profile and preference fit, not pledge size. The cohort is assembled from the same signal.
Nobody buys their way in. The town decides.
Your customers, right around the block
Up to 25,000 residents, all within a 5-minute walk. Car-free, so all of it is foot traffic.
Win your spot with rewards, not rent
Offer real perks to pledgers during the raise. The stronger your offer, the more customers and employees choose you before you even open.
Pay your people well, cost less to compete
The better the jobs you bring, the cheaper it is to pledge them.
Deliver consistent quality, keep your spot
Stewards vote annually. Deliver consistent, high-quality service, and you stay.
First in line, permanently
Pledge during a raise, and you keep priority for that town's future vacancies for good — ahead of any business that shows up later.
Attract your people, legally
You can't pick who lives here. But better rewards mean pledgers who want what you offer are more likely to be among those selected. Your generosity is the lever.
How you get in
Nothing stands between you and the pool.
Sign up, verify your EIN, and pledge jobs. That is the whole entry. Sign-up asks you one question no registry can answer for us — are you operating under a franchise, licence or area-development agreement? Yes disqualifies you on its face. Answering falsely is a breach of contract, not a detection problem. You do not have to be discovered first, and there is no business development team to get past — we want every business that wants a town in the running. Pledgers do still tag the places they want near them, and you can watch that land in real time: it is a signal, not a gate and not a score. What decides the lease is different — pledgers rank you two ways, as a place they'd actually spend money and as a place they might want to work, and those rankings are half the score.
See the Mainstay system →Getting on the list
Anyone can enter. Only the town decides who stays.
Entry is open on purpose — a great local baker with four hundred followers should not lose a town to a chain with two hundred thousand. What is not open is who wins: pledgers rank every business, and those rankings are half the score.
Pledger rankings
Half of your selection score, and the half no amount of budget can write for you. The other half is the jobs and salaries you pledge — and you are only ever ranked against your own category, so a neighbourhood café is never measured against an office employer.
Each town sets its own ownership rules
Which ownership structures a town accepts — independent, family, cooperative, non-profit, corporate, corporate subsidiary, PE-backed, franchise — is decided by its pledgers as part of what they curate during the raise. Each type is accepted by default and declined only by a simple majority of the pledgers who answer, and the tally is live, so it can move while the raise is open. You can watch where a town is leaning, but if its pledgers decline your type, you are simply not selected and you are simply not selected and your job pledge is never charged, the same as any business that does not win. Sign-up asks only for your EIN and one attestation. The proof comes after you are selected: before you sign a lease you provide the legal documents and tax filings that show who owns you, and the Council and stewards check them against what their town asked for. Fail it and the lease goes automatically to the next business on the waitlist. No appeal, no negotiation, no gap.
Every raise, fresh
Re-pledge each raise you want to be in. Each one funds a different town, so the host county is chosen once a year and the leases are chosen twelve times. Nothing carries over, and a business that stops showing up stops being ranked.
What entry actually costs
Two numbers, and only one of them depends on winning. The job pledge is authorised when you pledge and charged only if you are selected — lose, and it is never taken. The distribution fee is $1.00 per square foot of the footprint your pledge entitles you to, 160 sqft a job, so a twelve-job pledge is $1,920 a raise. That one is billed after the raise closes the way Meta and Pinterest bill you, in arrears against the distribution you actually received, whether or not you were selected. It is paid to the town's Civic Anchor, never to URBAL.
How rewards actually work for you
You can't choose them. You can attract them.
There's no picking individual customers or employees here — every business competes on the same open floor. What you do control completely is what you offer. Stronger rewards get ranked higher by pledgers, which improves your own odds of winning a spot.
Demand metrics are pledge-gated — pledge jobs to unlock aggregate, anonymised data about the pledger pool. Every number you see is aggregate; URBAL never shows a business individual-level pledger data.
See the pledge formula →