Protected Commission Desk

The recurring pain is not discovery; it is getting paid safely on the deals that arrive through DMs and social posts. The complaint evidence for that pain is real but thin and dated: a closed 2017 petition (1,117 supporters) states PayPal does not protect digital artwork and that invoices do not help, and one 2025 artist anecdote describes a refund-extortion attempt on a website order. Working artists who take custom orders already pay to be found and paid: VGen takes 5% plus processing, Ko-fi takes 5% or $12/month for 0%, and Artistree markets a buyer-paid fee. The marketplaces protect only deals made inside their own walls, so the hypothesis to test is that a flat-fee protected-order link can serve off-platform work by holding deposit and milestone money until delivery and auto-building a dispute file, while never taking a cut of the art. The unproven assumptions are that artists will route DM deals through a new link and that buyers will pay through it without creating an account. Validate by signing 10 VTuber/illustration artists who normally take PayPal for DM commissions, running one real $300+ commission through milestone escrow, and measuring whether the buyer pays through the link without creating an account and whether the artist would keep it at $15/month.