Rafflecopter Has Shut Down: Which Alternative for a Verifiable Giveaway?

Rafflecopter Has Shut Down

Rafflecopter stopped operating on October 1, 2025. For fifteen years, it was the default tool for running giveaways on blogs and social media. Overnight, thousands of organizers were left with no draw mechanism, no accessible history, and, in many cases, no proof that their past draws had been run fairly.

This shutdown isn't just an inconvenience. It raises a deeper question: what was trust in a Rafflecopter draw actually based on? In most cases, the answer is a screenshot of the widget at the moment of the draw. Nothing let an entrant verify, after the fact, that the announced winner was genuinely the one chosen by chance.

Comparing on one criterion only: proof

Three types of tools now present themselves as replacements: Gleam, KingSumo, and DrawSeal. Comparing them on engagement features — entry points, social shares, bonus tiers — would be misleading, because that's not what brought Rafflecopter down. The only criterion that matters is this: can an outside entrant verify the result without trusting the organizer?

• Gleam computes the winner server-side using an internal generator. The organizer gets a name, not a proof. Nothing is published before the draw.
• KingSumo works the same way: a closed calculation, a displayed result, no trail a third party can verify.
• DrawSeal seals the entrant list and the rules before the draw runs, then draws randomness from a public external source: drand, a distributed randomness beacon that publishes its output on a fixed schedule, independent of DrawSeal. Anyone can take the sealed list and the published drand round and recompute the winner themselves.

That last point changes the nature of any dispute. With Rafflecopter, a contested winner comes down to how much trust you place in the organizer. With a cryptographic seal paired with a public randomness source, the result is verifiable — not debatable.

What shouldn't get lost in the migration

Migrating a giveaway doesn't mean starting from scratch. Three things deserve particular attention:

• Entrant history. If you still have a Rafflecopter export (a CSV of entries), it imports directly into DrawSeal. If account access is already gone, only the addresses you collected elsewhere (an email list, a CRM) can be brought back in.
• Consent already given. An address imported from an old tool doesn't exempt you from revalidating consent for the new draw. DrawSeal enforces mandatory double opt-in on any imported list, precisely so an old history can't be used to skip that step.
• Traceability of the platform change. The new draw's rules should mention the platform change if entrants had already been told the draw would run through Rafflecopter.

Migrating a Rafflecopter giveaway to DrawSeal, step by step

1. Recover what you can. Export a CSV from your Rafflecopter account if it's still accessible, or gather the addresses you collected in parallel.
2. Import into DrawSeal. The import automatically applies deduplication, exclusion of disposable email domains, and a three-entry cap per IP address for new entries.
3. Republish updated rules that mention the new platform and draw method.
4. Open a 24-hour window before the draw: the entrant list is sealed, public, and can no longer be changed.
5. Let drand supply the randomness. The draw runs off the drand round published at the announced time. The result is reproducible by anyone who has the sealed list and the round used.

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