Comparison
Sage vs a bug bounty
The short answer. A bug bounty pays for security vulnerabilities, after someone finds one, at a price you negotiate. Sage pays for verified evidence that ordinary user journeys work or do not, at a price fixed before anyone starts. They solve different problems, and most pre-launch products need the second one first.
When is a bug bounty the right tool?
When your product holds funds or sensitive data and you need adversarial security research. Bounties are unbounded by design, which is the point: you cannot know in advance what a researcher will find or what it is worth, so the price is settled afterwards.
When is paid testing the right tool?
When you need to know whether a first-time visitor understands what your product is and can reach the thing it is for. That is a bounded, describable job, which is why it can be priced up front and judged mechanically.
How does the judging actually work?
Sage browses the product before any tester does, and keeps a private record of what it saw. A tester’s account is checked against that record. Because the record is built from Sage’s own observation and pinned before the mission is published, an answer cannot be reverse-engineered from the page.
There is deliberately no live feedback before a submission is judged. A strength meter or an as-you-type hint would be an answer key: someone could submit nothing and read the expected evidence off the meter. Knowing where not to build is part of the guarantee.
Can I run both?
Yes, and for anything holding real value you probably should. They cover different failure modes: a bounty finds the exploit a determined researcher can construct, and paid testing finds the ordinary person who could not work out what to do on your first screen. Neither substitutes for the other.
What Sage will never do. It does not look for vulnerabilities, and it will never ask a tester for credentials, a seed phrase or a private key. When a login or Connect Wallet screen stops it, it reads the product’s own documentation to understand what is behind the wall and designs missions for a tester who already has their own account.