About
A bag, eight stickers, one auction every two weeks.
I'm Marouane Gazouzi. I carry a Xiaomi Commuter Backpack through Paris every working day, on métro line 1 to an office at La Défense. Its front has eight sticker spots, rented by an auction every 14 days that closes Sunday at 20:00 Paris time. Bids start at €15, the loser is never charged, and a winner pays only once their sticker is on the bag and photographed.
Hey, I’m Marouane 👋
Senior Data Engineer in Paris, building halalbid.lol in public. This bag is the same idea with a strap on it: rent a spot by auction, never charge the loser, deliver before you charge the winner. Find me on X or at gazouzi.com.
Why a bag
A laptop lid faces a wall in a café. A bag faces the whole métro carriage, twice a day, on the busiest line in Paris — line 1, from home to La Défense and back, plus the lunch places, the meetups and the odd weekend. Nobody is scrolling past it. It is a small surface that a lot of people look at for a long time.
It also cost €29.99, which is the point. This is not a billboard with a rate card. It is one bag, eight stickers, and a price the market sets every fourteen days.
Why an auction, and why the loser pays nothing
On the boards this format comes from, you pay and your spot can be taken seconds later. That puts money at risk on an outcome you do not control — a wager, not a purchase. Here the order is the other way round. You bid, Stripe saves your card and holds nothing. At the close, the winners’ cards get a hold; everyone else’s is forgotten. And the hold is only captured once the stickers are on the bag and photographed.
So a winner pays for a thing that exists — a spot, for a known time, at a known price, already delivered — and a loser never pays at all. Not refunded: never charged. Money that was never taken cannot be lost. The rules spell out every step.
This is the mechanism halalbid.lol runs every day for a leaderboard of halal-verified products. Same code, same rule, one cycle every two weeks instead of one a day, and a physical thing at the end of it.
Who gets on
Anyone with a real site and a logo that prints, minus the same list halalbid.lol refuses: gambling, alcohol, interest-based finance, adult content, and anything I cannot verify. I look at every new site by hand before its sticker can win a spot. A rejected bid costs nothing: the card is forgotten and the site never appears on the board.
The bag
A Xiaomi Commuter Backpack, light blue, bought at mi.com. I picked it because it is what I already carried, and because the front of it is two flat panels and a pocket — eight clean rectangles a sticker sits on well.
bag.gazouzi.com is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Xiaomi. Xiaomi Commuter Backpack is a product of Xiaomi Inc. The bag pictured is mine; the stickers are the winners’.
Contact
Questions, a logo file, a sticker to pull: on X or via gazouzi.com.