CleverCrow is operated by Clever Crow, LLC. Backing an issue doesn't move any money, your CleverCrow wallet stays liquid. Money only commits when a maintainer starts an agent run, and only via reservations held against your wallet as the run works. Whatever a reservation doesn't spend settles back automatically. The rules below cover the edge cases.
Last updated 4 June 2026.
When a maintainer starts a run on an issue you're backing, a reservation is held against your wallet for the work ahead, sized to the issue's start threshold (a multi-phase run reserves afresh as it goes). If a reservation of $5 funded $2.30 of agent work, the remaining $2.70 settles back to your wallet. This happens whether the run merged successfully, was abandoned by the maintainer, or hard-failed. Wallet balance can fund any future run.
More detail on what counts as “work”, token usage at the underlying provider's rate, plus CleverCrow's platform fee, lives on How pledges work.
If a maintainer abandons a run, or it hard-fails before the agent does meaningful work, the full reservation settles back to your wallet. If the run had already burned some of the reservation before failing, you get the unburned remainder back, same as the default path.
Pledges hold scope, not money, so there's nothing to refund if a maintainer never picks up an issue you're backing. Your wallet stays liquid the whole time and can fund any other run. If you want to stop backing an issue, remove it from your pledge on the issue page or in My pledges.
Anywhere we say “refunded”, we mean a credit to your CleverCrow wallet, not a charge reversal on the card you paid with. To send a wallet balance back to the original card, open your wallet and use Withdraw: you can pull your available balance (anything not committed to an in-flight run) back to your card yourself, no email needed. Stripe's per-transaction processing fee on the original charge is not refundable, and the refund can take a few business days to appear. If anything looks off, email support@clevercrow.io and we'll help.
If you don't recognise a charge or think something is wrong, please email support@clevercrow.io before opening a dispute with your card issuer, we can almost always resolve it faster directly, including issuing a card refund where appropriate.
If a dispute is filed with your issuer or Stripe flags the charge for early fraud warning, we automatically pause the associated wallet and any in-flight runs funded by it until the matter is resolved. This protects both you and the other backers funding the same runs.
Wallet credits for unspent reservations appear within a few minutes of the run ending. Card refunds (when requested) are issued via Stripe and typically appear on your statement within 5-10 business days, depending on your bank.