Terms of Service

1 The agreement

These terms are between you and Opengiveaway.org. They apply the moment you create an account or use the service, including the free parts: the public giveaway pages, the standalone verifier and the protocol documentation.

The Privacy Policy and the Refund Policy are part of this agreement. If you are agreeing on behalf of a company, you confirm you are allowed to bind it, and “you” means that company.

If you do not accept these terms, do not use the service.

2 Accounts and teams

You need an account to run a giveaway, and one account belongs to one person. Keep your password to yourself, and tell us at [email protected] if you think someone else has it. What happens under your account is your responsibility.

A team owns giveaways. Whoever creates it is its owner and can invite others as admins or members; a team always has at least one owner. Anyone you invite can see the team’s giveaways, its entry lists and the plaintext identifiers of its winners, so invite accordingly. Owners and admins can publish, pay and delete.

You must be at least 18 years old and not barred from using the service under the law that applies to you.

3 What the service does

The service does a narrow, specific job:

• it takes an entry list you upload and commits it to a Merkle root, so the list cannot be changed afterwards;
• it timestamps that commitment on the Bitcoin blockchain through OpenTimestamps, so the list is provably older than the draw;
• it draws winners from the hash of a Bitcoin block chosen before the list was locked — a value nobody, including us, can predict or steer;
• it publishes a page where any participant can check their own entry and any auditor can re-run the whole draw.

The draw is deterministic and independently reproducible. You do not have to trust us about the outcome, and neither do your participants: the protocol is published at /protocol, the same check runs in any browser at /verify, and a command-line verifier reproduces it from the proof files alone.

4 Your giveaway is yours

We are a tool, not the promoter. You run the giveaway. That means you, and not us, are responsible for:

• the rules, eligibility, territory and the terms your participants agreed to;
• awarding and delivering every prize, including its cost, shipping, taxes and any substitution;
• whether the promotion is lawful where you run it — including lottery, gambling, sweepstakes, prize-competition, consumer and advertising law, platform rules such as those of X, Instagram, TikTok or YouTube, and any registration, bonding or filing your jurisdiction demands;
• collecting entries lawfully, and telling participants how their entry will be used;
• answering participants, including anyone who disputes the result.

We do not hold prizes, act as an escrow, verify that a prize exists, or contact winners on your behalf. If you fail to deliver a prize, that is between you and your participants.

A draw drawn on this platform is verifiably random. That is a statement about the randomness, not a statement that your promotion is legal or that your rules are fair.

5 Review and approval

Giveaways are reviewed by a human before they can be published. Review keeps spam, scams and illegal promotions off the platform. We may approve, approve with a discount attached, reject with a note, or ask for changes, and we may rate-limit how many giveaways a team has in review at once.

Review is a judgement about fit for this platform. It is not legal advice, and not an endorsement of your promotion, your rules or your prizes. Approval does not make an unlawful giveaway lawful.

Once approved, a giveaway’s title, link and description are locked while it stays approved — unpublish it first to change them. That is deliberate: a public page that changes its own terms after people have seen it is not verifiable.

6 Entry lists

By uploading an entry list you confirm that:

• you collected the identifiers in it lawfully, and you may use them to run this draw;
• the list reflects the entries you actually received, and you have not stuffed it or removed people to steer the outcome;
• you have told participants what they need to know about how their entry is processed;
• you accept that the list will be committed to a public fingerprint, and that if you switch on full-list publication their identifiers become public.

Identifiers are normalized and deduplicated per source before the list is locked, so the same account entered twice counts once, and the same handle on two platforms counts twice. Rows we cannot read as an identifier are rejected and reported to you before the draw.

We handle uploaded lists as your processor, on your instructions, as set out in the Privacy Policy.

7 Fees and publishing

The fee is per published giveaway. There is no subscription and no per-entry billing. Creating a giveaway, having it reviewed and uploading entries are free; you pay at the moment you publish, and you can walk away before then without paying anything.

Which tier applies depends only on how large a list you publish. Current prices are on the pricing page, and the price you see at the payment step — after any reviewer offer and coupon — is the price you pay. The fee you pay buys a ceiling on entries, not an exact count. If the locked list turns out larger than that ceiling, the freeze stops and tells you instead of billing you more; move up a tier and it proceeds. You are never charged an amount you did not confirm.

Lists above the published tiers are priced individually — contact us before you plan one. Prices are exclusive of any tax we are required to add, and we may change prices for future giveaways; a giveaway already paid for is unaffected.

Payments are handled by our payment provider, and your card details never reach us. Refunds are governed by the Refund Policy, which you should read before paying — in particular, publishing spends the fee.

8 The draw, and finality

Publishing sets three things in motion, on a schedule you do not control afterwards:

• the list is locked shortly before the draw, and its Merkle root is published and timestamped;
• the draw block is fixed — a Bitcoin block that has not been mined yet at the time of locking;
• the winners are derived from that block’s hash once it is mined, using the published protocol.

The result is final. We cannot re-run a draw, change who won, or edit a drawn page, and we will not do so on request — for you, for a participant, or for ourselves. That is the guarantee the platform sells. A drawn giveaway can never be deleted: the commitment is stamped on Bitcoin and the public page is the proof.

We depend on the Bitcoin network and on public block explorers for block data, and on OpenTimestamps calendar servers for timestamping. None of these are ours. Block timing varies, so a draw happens when its block is mined and not at a guaranteed minute. If independent explorers disagree about a block, the draw waits rather than proceeding on a value we cannot corroborate.

9 Acceptable use

Do not use the service to:

• run a lottery, gambling or prize promotion that is unlawful where your participants are;
• run a giveaway you do not intend to honour, or advertise prizes you do not have;
• upload identifiers you have no right to use, or scraped lists of people who never entered;
• publish content that is unlawful, deceptive, hateful, or that infringes someone else’s rights;
• imply that we endorse, sponsor or administer your giveaway, or present a verified draw as our approval of your promotion;
• probe, overload or work around the platform’s limits — including the review queue, the rate limits on entry lookups, or attempts to learn a giveaway’s per-giveaway secret or to reverse the commitments of people who are not you;
• resell or white-label the hosted service without our written agreement.

Re-running a published draw to check it is not just allowed, it is the point. Verification is free, needs no account, and we will never treat it as abuse.

10 Availability and failures

We do not promise a specific uptime. We may take the service down for maintenance, and we will avoid doing so around a scheduled draw where we can.

When something goes wrong, the platform is built to stop rather than guess. A giveaway whose list could not be locked — because it exceeded the tier you paid for, because its draw block passed, or because an upstream service was unreachable — is marked as failed or invalid on its own public page, with the reason. Nothing is drawn from a list that was not properly locked. What we owe you in that situation is set out in the Refund Policy.

Neither of us is liable for a failure caused by something genuinely outside our control: a Bitcoin network disruption or deep reorganisation, the failure of every public block explorer at once, an outage at our hosting or payment provider, a change in platform rules, or an act of government.

11 Intellectual property

The OpenGiveaway software is free software, published under the GNU Affero General Public License v3, and the protocol is documented so anyone can implement or audit it. You may run your own instance under that licence — nothing here restricts the rights it grants you. These terms govern the hosted service at opengiveaway.org, not your use of the source code.

The name “OpenGiveaway”, our logo and the look of this site are ours, and the licence does not grant you rights in them.

Your content stays yours: your giveaway text, prizes, branding and entry lists. You grant us only the licence we need to host, process and display them in order to run the service — including publishing your giveaway page and the proof files, which stay up after the draw because they are the proof.

12 Warranties

The service is provided “as is”. To the extent the law allows, we disclaim all implied warranties, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose and non-infringement.

What we do stand behind is narrow and concrete: that a draw run here follows the published protocol and can be independently verified. We do not warrant that:

• the service will be uninterrupted or error-free;
• your giveaway is lawful, or that your rules are enforceable;
• third-party networks and services we rely on will behave;
• an entry list is accurate — that depends on what you uploaded.

Nothing here excludes liability that cannot be excluded by law, and if you are a consumer your statutory rights are unaffected.

13 Liability

Neither of us is liable for indirect, incidental, special or consequential loss, or for lost profit, revenue, goodwill or data, however it arises.

Our total liability to you for all claims relating to a giveaway is capped at the fee you paid for that giveaway, and our total liability under this agreement is capped at the greater of the fees you paid us in the twelve months before the claim, or US$100.

In particular, we are not liable for the value of any prize, for a promotion you had to cancel, or for a loss caused by a third-party network or service failing. These limits apply even if we were told the loss was possible, and they do not apply to liability we cannot lawfully limit — including death or personal injury caused by negligence, and fraud.

14 Indemnity

You will indemnify us against claims, losses and reasonable costs arising from your giveaway — including a claim by a participant or a regulator, a claim that your promotion was an unlawful lottery, a claim about an undelivered prize, and a claim about how you collected or used the identifiers you uploaded. This does not apply to the extent the claim is caused by our own breach of this agreement.

15 Suspension and termination

You can stop using the service at any time and ask us to close your account at [email protected]. Closing your account does not remove a giveaway that has already been drawn — see why.

We may suspend or close an account, or refuse to publish a giveaway, if you breach these terms, if a giveaway appears unlawful or fraudulent, if a payment is reversed, or if we are required to. Where it is reasonable to do so we will warn you first and explain why. We will not use this to interfere with a draw that is already committed: a locked list is drawn and published as the protocol requires.

Clauses that are meant to outlive the agreement — fees already owed, intellectual property, warranties, liability, indemnity and governing law — survive it.

16 Changes

We may change these terms as the product changes, and the date at the top will say when. For a material change we will email account holders at least 30 days before it takes effect. A giveaway you have already paid for stays on the terms that applied when you paid. Continuing to use the service after a change means you accept it.

17 Governing law

Before filing anything, write to [email protected]. Most disputes here are misunderstandings about what the proof shows, and those are usually settled by walking through the verification together.