Nobody is scoring your application against anyone else's

Founders who have raised venture money or applied for innovation grants arrive with a set of expectations: a deadline, a panel, a pitch, a percentage of applicants who get through. They ask what the acceptance rate is, whether the budget runs out, and how strong their case needs to be.

Those questions have no answers here, because the thing they describe does not exist. Decision 10962 is a rule that pays a stated percentage of named expenses to any company meeting its conditions.

What "automatic" means and does not mean

The Decision lists categories of spending: advertising and promotion abroad, app store and platform commissions, trade fair participation, certification, agent commissions. Against each it sets a support rate, an annual cap and conditions.

You spend money in one of those categories, you document it, you file within the window, and the Ministry reimburses the stated percentage. Nobody weighs your company against another applicant. Nobody decides that your game is less deserving than someone else's SaaS product. There is no scoring rubric because there is nothing to score.

What "automatic" does not mean is easy. The conditions are specific and companies fail them regularly. It means the failure is factual and fixable rather than discretionary.

Where the real limits sit

Two constraints are genuine, and both are published in advance.

The first is the caps. Each support item carries an annual ceiling, and several carry a per-product or per-event ceiling as well. Those numbers are the actual limit on what a company receives in a year, and you can read them before you spend anything. Our guides list them item by item, with the figures taken from the Decision.

The second is the fund. Support is paid from the Support and Price Stability Fund, and the Ministry is charged with managing that budget effectively and fairly. That is a real piece of administrative reality. It is not a queue with a cut-off point, and the Decision does not create one, so preparing for a race is preparing for the wrong thing.

Why the "success rate" question misleads

Ask about success rates and you will find people quoting figures. Read them carefully and they describe something else.

When a claim fails under this programme it fails because spending went through a personal card, or an invoice carries the wrong company name, or the filing missed the six-month window, or the expense was never in a supported category. Those are properties of the file. Aggregate them across every company filing in a year and you get a number that looks like an acceptance rate but is actually a measure of how well companies prepare.

That distinction has a practical edge. If the outcome were competitive, the sensible response would be to make your application more persuasive. Because it is factual, the sensible response is to make your records match the conditions. The second is a bookkeeping exercise, and it is much more reliably done.

Why claims get rejected covers the four causes behind most failures, and all four are inside your control.

Grant programmes are a different animal

Türkiye also runs programmes that genuinely are competitive. TÜBİTAK funds research and development projects and assesses them on their merits, which is a real evaluation with a real prospect of a no.

Companies conflate the two, and it costs them time. Preparing for Decision 10962 as though it were a grant round means writing narrative about vision and impact for a process that wants an invoice, a payment record and proof that the customer was abroad. Preparing for a TÜBİTAK call as though it were a reimbursement means submitting receipts to a panel that wanted a project.

If both are on your list, they need separate preparation, and whether you can hold both at once has its own rules.

What to do with the time you were going to spend competing

The energy that would go into a pitch is better spent on three unglamorous things.

Get the payment trail right from the first month, because paying from the company account is the single most common defect and it cannot be repaired after the fact. Know your caps before you plan the spend, so the budget lands where the support actually reaches. Diarise the filing windows, because the deadline is the one failure that no amount of documentation quality can undo.

None of that is persuasion. It is the whole of what determines the outcome.