- Who decides who gets funded?
- Nobody chooses. There is no panel, no vote, and no application to be accepted or rejected. You ask, you join the back of the queue immediately, and you move up as the people ahead of you are funded. The order is the order people arrived. There is a short list of things Rally will not fund, all of them about what is legal, what is true, or whose debt it is, and a request can be removed for those. Nothing else removes anybody, and no number of complaints does it automatically.
- Can people vote somebody off the queue?
- No. Members can report a request against the published list of things Rally will not fund, and a person reviews those reports. A report is not a vote: there is no counter beside anybody’s name and no number of them that removes somebody on its own. A queue where the crowd decides would measure who is sympathetic rather than who is struggling, and the people with the least sympathetic stories are often the ones in the most trouble.
- What if somebody is lying?
- Some will be. Rally verifies who a person is, never what happened to them, so nobody is asked to document an illness or prove an eviction. A system strict enough to catch every liar mostly catches the people with the least paperwork, and those are usually the people in the worst trouble. Rally would rather be occasionally fooled than routinely shut, which is not the same as not caring: a request shown to rest on a claim that is false is removed. What it does have: every recipient verified by Stripe under their legal name with a traceable bank account, a public queue anybody can report against, and a week between a contribution being charged and being sent on.
- If nobody approves requests, what stops someone making one up?
- Money only moves to a verified identity. Before your turn comes you complete Stripe Connect, which collects your legal name, date of birth, address, tax identification, and a bank account in your name, with photo identification above certain amounts. That is a federal requirement for receiving money through a licensed processor, and it is a far harder thing to fake than a sad story. Rally can also remove anyone found to be misusing it, and every contribution waits about a week before it is sent onward, so one that turns out to be bad can often be stopped before it leaves.
- Can I give more than the minimum?
- Yes, and it is worth knowing where the extra goes. Rally keeps one dollar a month whatever you contribute, so raising your amount does not enlarge the platform’s cut. Everything above that, beyond what the card network charges to move it, reaches the person being funded. You can change it from your settings whenever you like. It takes effect on your next billing date, and you can move it back down the same way.
- What if I do not want to fund a particular person?
- You can hold your contribution for a cycle from your settings, and you are not charged for it. Rally does not take money it is not passing on, so a held cycle is simply a month you did not pay for. Nobody is told that you held.
- What happens when nobody is in the queue?
- Nothing is charged. Rally pauses collection on every membership while there is nobody who can be paid, and tells you it has done so. A charge that lands anyway, in the window before the pause takes effect, is refunded in full. Rally does not hold money for a recipient who does not exist yet, and it does not invent one to justify a charge.
- What if someone is funded partway through the month?
- Once a person reaches what they asked for, any further contributions that were headed to them route to the next person in the queue instead. Nothing is split across two people within a single charge, which keeps every charge traceable to one destination.
- Can I get my money back?
- For about a week after it is charged, yes, in full. Contributions wait in Rally’s balance before being sent onward, and anything still waiting can simply be given back. After that it has reached the person it was for and cannot be pulled back from them. Either way, contact support and a person will look at it rather than an automatic rule. You can stop contributing at any time, and you keep access for the period you already paid for.
- Is this tax deductible?
- No, and that is worth being clear about even though what happens here is genuinely generous. Rally is not a registered nonprofit, so contributions do not work like donations at tax time. Money received through Rally may count as income for the person receiving it, and Stripe issues the relevant tax forms above the reporting threshold. Anyone receiving money should speak to a tax professional.
- Who holds the money?
- Stripe does, throughout. Your payment settles into Rally’s Stripe balance and the recipient’s share is transferred out of it to their own Stripe account about a week later. So it does pass through Rally on the way, and it waits there first. That wait is deliberate: a card payment can be reversed by the person who made it for months afterwards, and Rally is the one Stripe debits when that happens, so sending it onward the same day would mean paying it out and then being made to repay it with no way to recover it. What Rally never does is move it through a bank account of its own, or decide where it goes. The queue order decides that, and the licensed processor moves it.
- Does it arrive all at once or bit by bit?
- All at once by default, and it is theirs to change. Contributions reach their Stripe account one at a time, about a week behind the payment that funded each one, and they gather there until the full amount is reached before moving to their bank, because most people ask for a number: the arrears, the deposit, the bill. A trickle under that number gets absorbed by the week it landed in and the thing they asked about stays unfixed. Anybody who would rather have it as it comes can say so from their own page at any point, and then it arrives as a weekly deposit instead. Either way the money is theirs from the moment it is sent to them, and anything gathered is released to them if their turn ends before they reach the amount.