I built a pay-to-rank leaderboard where every paid spot ships an auto-made promo video

I'm Ali, and I've been building Bid Spotlight (https://bidspotlight.com) — a monthly ranked leaderboard for products where the ranking is openly pay-to-rank, and every paid spot ships with an automatically generated promo video.

Why pay-to-rank, openly?

Small products have almost no affordable way to get in front of buyers. The channels that work are either expensive, opaque, or both: directories sell "featured" slots quietly, social reach is a lottery, and ads need budgets and skills most solo founders don't have yet.

So instead of pretending the ranking is organic, Bid Spotlight is explicit about it: you bid for your spot.

• Rank is total bid value for the current month
• First bid on a rank must beat the current occupant by at least $1
• Minimum bid is $5
• The board resets on the 1st of every month

Every placement is labeled "Sponsored". Every listing is screened against a published halal and safety policy before it can rank. There's a public about page that explains exactly how money and ranking interact.

What every paid spot includes

• A 45–60 second vertical (9:16) promo video, built automatically from your site's real content, in your brand colors, with an AI voiceover (disclosed in the video). It's yours to keep and reuse in your own ads.
• The leaderboard spot for the month.
• The top 3 each month are featured in the site's daily YouTube and X posts.
• The month's #1 wins one month of free Meta ads for their promo video, subject to Meta's ad policy approval.

Here's an example of an auto-made video (this one promotes the site itself): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDFHJDfFEQQ

The boring-but-important parts

• Payments run through Stripe Checkout, and rank changes only happen from the verified webhook event — never from the payment redirect.
• Listings are screened (halal/safety) before anything ranks.
• The reset happens on the 1st, so nobody can buy a permanent position — the board is monthly by design.

What I'd like feedback on

I'm not fishing for upvotes — I want blunt answers:

1. Does openly pay-to-rank read as honest or as sleazy? My bet is that clearly labeled placements beat shadow "featured" sections, but I might be wrong.
2. Is $5 too low to signal quality? It makes the board accessible; it also makes it cheap to test.
3. Would you actually use the auto-made video? The videos are 9:16, ready for Reels/Shorts/TikTok — is that a deliverable you'd value, or a nice-to-have?

Site: https://bidspotlight.com — everything about how it works is on the about page. Happy to answer anything about the model, the video pipeline, or the screening policy.