Plain answers for the people who ask hard questions — procurement and HR teams, IT and security reviewers, school administrators, and anyone who's been burned by “free” platforms. Everything below is verifiable in our Terms & Privacy.
SimplyRaffle is small and founder-run. When you have a question, you deal directly with the person who built it.
Every page and form on every domain uses TLS encryption. No HTTP fallback. Modern ciphers only.
Stripe is PCI-DSS Level 1 certified and handles all payment data end-to-end. We can't leak what we don't have.
As of 10 August 2026, every draw is recorded in a tamper-evident log: the seed, timestamp, who initiated, which entries qualified, and the winner. Downloadable for your finance team, the board, or your treasurer. The record is built to keep the raffle's organizer honest to their participants — it shows the organizer did not change the draw afterward — which is the accusation an organizer actually faces. It treats SimplyRaffle as trusted infrastructure, the same trust the random-number generator itself already requires, and does not claim to prove anything against the platform operator.
On paid plans, participant data is permanently deleted from production systems 45 days after your draw — names, contact details, entries, images. You get a full export first, and deletion waits until it has been delivered. The draw log stays as compliance evidence, referring to participants only by internal record numbers. Free-plan, annual and retain-mode timelines differ. Full retention schedule ↓
All application data is hosted in the United States, fronted by Cloudflare. Basic, Starter and Pro events run on Railway, a United States cloud host, and move to SimplyRaffle-operated servers in the San Francisco Bay Area after the event. Community and Annual plans run on SimplyRaffle-operated servers from the start. Upgrading does not change where a site is hosted.
Participant email addresses are used solely for raffle communications — invitations, reminders, draw results. No newsletters, no promos, no follow-up sequences.
Swipe sideways to see the whole table →
| Paid plans (default, auto-delete) | Community (free) | |
|---|---|---|
| Raffle archived | — | 7 days after signup if no draw has been run (a draw date set within the next 60 days holds the archive until then), and 7 days after the draw once it has. |
| Export emailed to you | 30 days after your draw. | At the moment of archiving (it never blocks deletion). |
| Participant data deleted | 45 days after the draw, permanently, from production systems. | Within 7 days of archiving, from production systems. |
Participant data. The organization running the raffle decides what participant data is collected and why. Under California law it is the “business” and SimplyRaffle is its “service provider,” so requests to see, correct or delete participant data go to the organization, and we help the organization answer them. Email [email protected] and we will route your request to the right organizer.
Organizer data. For the account data of the person who runs the raffle, their name, email address and billing contact, SimplyRaffle is the one making the decisions. We are well below every CCPA applicability threshold and are not a “business” under the statute, but we honor access, correction and deletion requests for that data anyway. Email [email protected]. We will confirm we received your request within 10 business days and do our best to complete it within 30.
We do not sell or share personal information, for cross-context behavioral advertising or for anything else, and we never have.
SimplyRaffle is operated from the United States and built for United States organizations. All data is stored and processed in the United States. We do not market to, or sell to, organizations in the European Union or the United Kingdom, and we are not set up to meet the obligations that come with holding European personal data. If your organization is subject to the GDPR or UK GDPR, please contact us at [email protected] before you put any participant data into the service.
The processor terms required by GDPR Article 28 and the CCPA are in our Terms.
Running a school or youth event? SimplyRaffle is designed for use by adult event organizers. The organizer enters participants; we never ask a child for anything. The sign-up form asks for a name and an email address. An organizer can also turn on a phone-number field and add their own questions, so what a particular form asks depends on how the organizer has set it up. No form asks for an age or a date of birth. If your roster has a class or grade column, you can choose to show it beside winner names on your public results page. It is off unless you turn it on in Settings, Public Display.
Where an event involves participants under 13, a school or youth-group fundraiser for example, the organizer is responsible for having whatever authorization applies before entering a child's information, including verifiable parental consent where COPPA requires it. Which basis applies depends on the organizer and the event, and it is the organizer's call and the organizer's responsibility, not ours.
We don't sell participant data, ever, and we don't use it for advertising or profiling. We don't sign district agreements or DPAs. If your reviewer needs written answers, email [email protected] and you'll get a dated factual summary of what your account holds, where it runs, and when it's deleted. If we learn that we have inadvertently collected personal information from a child under 13, we will promptly delete it. Email [email protected] if you believe we hold such data.
Each is bound by its own terms and privacy policy. We share the minimum data each needs to do its job.
Always engaged (every event)
Receives organizer name, email, billing details for paid-tier checkout and Community SetupIntent. Stores all card data. We never see it.
Stripe privacy →Receives organizer + participant email addresses to deliver raffle invitations, Magic Link entries, and draw results.
Resend privacy →Serves the marketing site, terminates TLS, and fronts tenant traffic via Tunnel. Receives IP addresses and HTTP metadata.
Cloudflare privacy →Holds uploaded prize images and logos, the nightly database snapshot, and the post-event export. Images and logos are held in a bucket shared with other customers, separated by a per-customer key prefix. Encrypted at rest by Cloudflare under Cloudflare's keys.
Cloudflare DPA →Holds the source code and container images, and runs the nightly backup job, which copies each account's database to Cloudflare R2. No copy is kept at GitHub.
GitHub privacy →Hosting (United States)
Operator-managed infrastructure in the United States, fronted by Cloudflare. Each tenant runs in its own container with its own database.
Ask about your event →Hosts Basic, Starter and Pro events. Per-tenant database. Each moves to SimplyRaffle-operated servers after its event unless you ask us not to.
Railway privacy →AI subprocessors (only when you use the feature)
✨ Generate from photo: prize image, prize name and raffle name → Gemini → 1–2 sentence description. Community includes 5 of these. ✨ Magic Setup Wizard (fallback): if Anthropic is unavailable, your description is sent to Gemini instead. No participant data sent. ✨ Magic Import: the spreadsheet, text file or PDF you choose to upload → Gemini → a structured participant list. This is the one AI feature that sees participant names and emails: the vendor receives the file you upload and, so that it can match new rows against people already entered, the names and email addresses already on your participant list. Very large files are matched without AI. Per-account cap: a lifetime budget of 100 import credits. A spreadsheet or text file costs 1 credit, a PDF costs 3, so how many imports you get depends on the file type: 100 if they are all spreadsheets, about 33 if they are all PDFs. Only successful imports are charged. Not used for model training.
Google Cloud DPA →Magic Setup Wizard: your description is sent to Anthropic's Claude, which returns the recommended preset; no participant data sent. Magic Import (fallback, used only when Google's Gemini is unavailable): Claude performs the same column detection on the file you upload, the same participant data, under the same terms. Not used for model training.
Anthropic commercial terms →SimplyRaffle is the drawing tool, not the payment processor. You pay us a one-time fee per event (or per year for repeat orgs) and that's the entire transaction. We don't take a percentage of your raffle. We don't show donor tip prompts at checkout. We don't add platform fees to ticket prices. If your supporters pay you $5 for a ticket, you receive $5.
However your organization already collects money — cash in a lockbox, check in the offering plate, Venmo, Zelle, Stripe Checkout, a card reader at the table, a Square terminal — that's how you keep collecting it. SimplyRaffle never touches the money, never sees the money, and isn't in the payment flow at all. You enter buyers into the drawing (via Magic Import, manual entry, or our walk-up Ticket Table in Kiosk Mode) and we run the drawing. Two separate operations.
Procurement, vendor security review, HR, a school district business office or a parish finance committee: if you have a checklist to run, email [email protected]. Usually the same business day, you'll get written answers to your security questionnaire, the subprocessor list above, and a signed, dated factual statement of exactly what your account holds, where it runs, who else touches it, how it is encrypted and when it is deleted.
On contracts: every customer is on the same published Terms, which include the processor terms. We don't sign customer agreements, DPAs, vendor forms or purchase orders.
Email [email protected] →Full legal text: Terms & Privacy