Who pays the rent

Every room in the house is open to anyone at no charge, and nobody signs a register at the door. Keeping the lights on still costs money — the address, the server, and the evenings spent cleaning word lists in four languages — so here is the whole arrangement in plain words.

Frames for adverts in the stairwell

The reading rooms of the site — the front hall, the games hub, the how-to-play pages and the guides — carry one or two framed spaces kept for adverts. Each frame is labelled Advert, so nobody mistakes it for a room, a clue or a button.

Google AdSense will fill those frames as soon as our account is connected. Meanwhile every frame shows a note of ours that leads back to this page.

Sponsoring a game or a floor

A business can also sponsor one game, or a run of rooms such as a whole floor of Word Ladder. Its name then appears in a separate box marked Sponsored by, on a reading page and never inside a room. A sponsor buys a mention, not a say: the words, the answers and the difficulty stay ours.

House rules we will not break

• No advert inside a puzzle grid, on its keyboard or laid over its buttons.
• No paid advantages: hints, extra tries and lit windows are not for sale.
• Nothing about our visitors is sold or passed on — there is no visitor file to sell.
• No pop-up window that blocks a game while you play.

Talk to the landlord

For an advert frame or a sponsorship, write to hello@gridwordhouse.com and say which games or floors you have in mind. The same mailbox answers any question about this page.