How This Site Works

This page is the method. It is public for one reason. Take any page on this site, hold it against these rules, and see where it came up short.

None of this is about being nice. Each rule is aimed at something specific that is broken in this subject.

One. If it is not in the fact sheet, it does not print

One research file sits behind this site. Every entry in it has a number, the exact words of its source, and a link to where those words live.

A claim without an entry never reaches a page. Not when it is obviously true. Not when every other page online says it. It waits until somebody opens the real document.

That rule is annoying about twice a week. It is also the only reason this site is worth reading.

Here is why. Every wrong claim found while building this came from the same place. Somebody had summed up a source they never actually opened.

Two. Their words go on the page next to mine

Open almost any page here and you will find a box in two halves.

The top half is the real wording, in typewriter letters, with a link. A state law, or an app's own terms. Not a summary of them. The words.

The bottom half is me saying what that means.

The point is not decoration. It is that you can check me in twenty seconds. If the plain version does not match the wording above it, you can see that yourself, and I would want to know.

Where there is no official source, there is no box. Inventing one to fill the space would break the only rule that makes those boxes worth anything.

Three. Reading level is a build gate

This is the odd one. So here is exactly what it means.

Before this site can go out, a script measures every page. It works out a reading grade from sentence length and from how many syllables the words carry. The target is grade 6.

Go over grade 7 and the build stops. Nothing publishes at all until that page is rewritten.

Sentences get counted too. The average across a page has to sit at 14 words or under.

The same script checks one more thing. A short form made of capital letters has to be explained on the page it appears on. Not on some other page you never opened. A few get a pass, because you meet them in real life anyway.

Now the reason a writing rule gets treated like a broken link.

On most of the questions here, the facts are already public and free. Nobody argues about them. The only thing between you and them is the writing. Every page explaining them was built for an adult with a lawyer.

So on this site, a page you cannot read is not bad style. It is the bug.

Four. A written list of claims that are banned here

Twenty two entries so far. Each one is a claim that is common, confident and wrong. Each has to be corrected wherever it shows up.

Two of them are set out below in full. That is enough to show you the bar.

The five states thing

Three of the top ranking pages on this all name the same five states. Colorado, Illinois, Minnesota, Oregon and Texas. Not one of the three shows you a law.

Checked one at a time, three of them hold up. Colorado, Illinois and Oregon each put 18 in the statute. Illinois says it in plain words: "other than natural persons under 18 years of age".

Minnesota is wrong. The old law with 18 in it was thrown out at the start of 2018. Read what replaced it. There is no age in it anywhere.

Texas was never right. The office that handles the filing says so on its own website. Texas law "does not impose any age requirements" on who can own or run a business there.

So this site prints the correction. It names all five states and links all five laws.

The Stripe age

You will read all over the place that Stripe makes you be 18. Stripe's own help page puts the number at 13.

It is on the list for a bigger reason than one wrong number. That gap is the shape of this whole subject.

The age is hardly ever about who may have an account. It is about who the money legally belongs to. A guardian has to own that account before it can take a payment.

Those are two different questions. Mixing them up is how nearly every page on this ends up wrong.

One more, because it is the pattern

People write that the tax office makes you be 18 to get a business tax number.

So those pages were searched. The form instructions too. Searched for age, for 18, for minor and for adult. There is nothing there. The IRS states no age rule in either direction.

This site reports the hole instead of filling it. "Nobody publishes an answer to this" is a real sentence, and often the most useful one on a page.

The rule with no exceptions

Nothing here will ever read as a way around an age gate.

Saying a parent or guardian has to own the account is correct. It is on half the pages here. That is how these products are actually built. It is the normal route, not a workaround for kids who cannot cope alone.

Anything that reads as how to look older is a different thing entirely. It would be the worst defect this site could ship. The build scans every page for it and refuses to publish if it finds any.

Never a state rule dressed up as a national one

This is the defining mistake of nearly every page competing with this one.

Somebody reads one state's law. They write "you have to be 18". Now a reader in Texas believes a rule from Colorado.

Cottage food, licences, sales tax and company filing all move state by state. Some of them move by county on top of that.

Where a rule depends on where you live, the page says so. Then it shows you how to look up your own.

What this site leaves alone on purpose

Two other sites by the same person already cover questions that sit next to these. Rather than write a worse second version, this site points at them.

This site owns one thing. Running your own business under 18.

That covers what you are allowed to do, what you have to file, how you get paid, what you own, and who is trying to sell you something.

The build warns me when a page drifts across that line. Two of my own sites fighting over one question helps nobody, and least of all you.

What the date on a page means

It means a person went back that day and read that page's sources over again.

It does not mean a word changed. Correcting a spelling does not move it. Drop that rule and the date would mean nothing at all.

Two things here get re-read most. The list of apps and their ages, because companies change payout rules and announce nothing. And anything a state can rewrite between one visit and the next.

Corrections

Mistakes get fixed in the open. The page changes and the date moves.

Where the fix changes what you were being told, a note about the change stays there for good. Quiet edits are not allowed. People make real decisions from these pages.

If something is wrong, say so. A correction with a link on it beats every other kind of message.

Where a book is allowed to appear

The person writing this site also wrote a book about it. Six pages here link to that book. Always under the sources, never above the answer, and never more than one to a page.

It never appears anywhere in the section about people selling you things.

Those pages exist to tell you not to hand money to strangers who promise you a business. An advert at the bottom of one would be the same move in a smaller font.

No page here holds back part of its answer to make a book look necessary. There are no star ratings on it, no invented reader quotes, and no review markup anywhere on the site.