Nothing needs to be approved. On a funded SwayQ collaboration, submitting a delivery opens a seven-day review window, adjusted so it never expires on a weekend. Inside that window the brand can raise a dispute if the delivery genuinely misses the brief. If it does not, the milestone becomes due when the window closes, and a daily sweep releases it to the creator. A brand that goes quiet does not hold the fee, because holding the fee was never something silence could do.
That is worth stating precisely, because plenty of arrangements in this category work the other way, and the difference decides who carries the cost of a slow inbox.
There is no approve-and-pay button
This surprises people on both sides, so it is worth being blunt about it. There is no action a brand can take to release a creator's payment early, and none it can take to withhold one. The release is driven by the clock and the sweep, not by a decision.
What the brand can do inside the window is raise a dispute. That pauses the release while the disagreement is worked through. Everything else it might do, including nothing at all, ends in the same place: the milestone releases.
Framed as a default, it reads simply. The default is that the creator gets paid. The brand's move is to object.
Why unanswered deliveries are so common
Almost never malice. The pattern is mundane and it repeats:
- The person who commissioned the campaign is on holiday, and nobody else feels authorised to weigh in.
- The approver changed jobs between the brief and the delivery.
- The brief was one of eleven things on someone's week and it was not the loudest.
- The brand is waiting for an internal opinion (legal, the founder, a regional team) that nobody chased.
In an invoice-at-the-end arrangement, every one of those costs the creator weeks, because the creator's only tool is to ask again. The work is already published, the brand already has what it wanted, and the creator is negotiating from empty hands.
What the window actually changes
It converts a delay into a deadline. The money for a funded campaign is already sitting as a deposit with Stripe under its e-money licence, so nothing has to be collected from anyone. The only open question is timing, and the window answers it with a default that requires nobody to act.
Four details matter:
- It runs from submission, not from publication. The clock starts when the creator submits the delivery in the system, so a brand cannot restart it by asking to look again.
- It is weekend-safe. The window is nudged forward so it never expires on a Saturday or Sunday. A Friday delivery is not quietly disadvantaged by the calendar.
- It is per deliverable. A collaboration with three pieces has three windows and three releases, so one contested item does not hold the whole fee.
- It is not instant. The release runs on a daily sweep, so payment lands within roughly a day of the window closing rather than at the exact moment it does. Predictable, not immediate.
What a dispute does
A dispute is not a payment failure and it is not a verdict. It is a pause with a process attached.
Both sides can see the same record: every state change in the collaboration, written append-only, so a correction is a new entry rather than an edit of an old one. Nothing gets quietly rewritten to suit whoever is arguing. If the two sides settle on a revised amount, that settlement is written as its own entry with the original and the new figure both recorded, and the payout then runs through the same release path as any other milestone. There is exactly one code path that can pay a creator, and a settled dispute uses it too.
The limit worth knowing
The window protects a milestone that has funding behind it. If a collaboration was never funded, the payout path refuses to transfer rather than quietly covering it, and the milestone stays pending instead. That is deliberate: SwayQ never fronts money a brand did not put up. It also means the question "is this one funded" comes before every other protection on this page.
What this means for each side
If you are a creator: submit through the platform rather than by email or DM, because the submission is what starts the clock. A file sent by WhatsApp is not a delivery in the system, and it earns you nothing.
If you are a brand: the window is the service level you signed up to, not a trap. If a delivery genuinely misses the brief, raise it inside the window; that is what the dispute path is for and it works. If the delivery is fine, you need do nothing at all.
The one-line version
Nothing happening is the outcome the creator needed protecting from, so on a funded collaboration nothing happening is not a stable state. After seven days it becomes a payout.
If you would rather work with that as the default, create a creator profile or post a funded brief.