When you ask a question, you can choose to either pay for an answer to the question, or you can make it a "free" question by simply saying that you are prepared to pay £0 for an answer. However, you are likely to get more responses to your question if you are prepared to pay for an answer to it.

If you are going to pay for an answer to your question, you will need to deposit the fee into your BumperBrain account before the expert answers the question (unless you already have sufficient funds in your account). If you have set the price you are prepared to pay for an answer, you must deposit the fee into your account before or when you post your question. Conversely, if experts are quoting you a price to answer your question, you must deposit the fee into your account before or when you accept a quote that has been submitted by an expert.

In order to give complete peace of mind to both inquisitor and expert, BumperBrain operates a simple escrow system when an inquisitor pays a fee to an expert.

Thus, when a fixed-fee question (ie. one in which the inquisitor sets the price they will pay for an answer to the question) is posted on the system the fee is tranferred from the inquisitor's BumperBrain account into the inquisitor's escrow account. Similarly, when the inquisitor accepts an experts quote to answer a question, the quoted amount is tranferred from the inquisitor's BumperBrain account into the inquisitor's escrow account. At this point the fee is still credited to the inquisitor's account, but it cannot be withdrawn from their account unless the question is deleted or the expert's quote is rejected, giving the expert the peace of mind that comes from knowing the fee is available and will be paid to them.

When the expert submits their answer to the question, the fee is tranferred from the inquisitor's escrow account to the expert's escrow. At this point the fee has been credited to the expert's account, but cannot cannot be withdrawn from their account until 14 days after the question is answered, giving the inquisitor the peace of mind that comes from knowing that they will have an opportunity to dispute the answer in the unlikely event that they feel it was not satisfactory.