Frequently asked questions

You paste the comments from your giveaway post, choose the rules (one entry per person, ignore emoji-only comments, require a minimum number of tagged friends), and Veridraw builds the qualified entry pool from that text.

Before anything is drawn, two things are locked in public view: a fingerprint of the exact entry list, and a hash of a secret seed we generate. The draw is also bound to a specific future round of drand, a public randomness beacon run by an independent group of organisations — a number that does not exist yet at that moment.

When you reveal, the winner’s position is calculated from those three things combined: our secret seed, the beacon’s random value, and the entry-list fingerprint. We then publish the secret seed, so anyone can redo the whole calculation and land on the same winner.

The animation on the stage is only a display of a result that was already decided. It never picks anybody.

See a real certificate

Open your giveaway post’s comments and keep pressing “View more comments” until the whole thread is loaded — Instagram shows only a slice at first, and anything you have not loaded cannot be copied. Select the comment area, copy it, and paste it into Veridraw at veridraw.io. No Instagram account is connected and nothing is authorised: the comments arrive as text.

Veridraw recognises the structure an instagram.com copy produces, pulls out the usernames and comment text, removes duplicate entries so nobody gets several chances by commenting twice, and counts the distinct @mentions in each comment if your rules say “tag two friends”.

You then run the draw. The winner is selected by a commit-reveal process bound to drand, a public randomness beacon, and the result is published as a certificate your followers — and the winner — can re-check in their own browser. It is free for 1 draw a month with up to 200 comments.

One thing no honest tool can do: Instagram does not expose follower data through its API, so nobody can automatically verify that entrants followed you. Veridraw checks only what is in the comment text.

Copy the comments from your TikTok post and paste them into Veridraw at veridraw.io — but do it in a few batches. TikTok keeps only a handful of comments loaded in the page at a time and discards the rest as you scroll, so one select-all can never capture the whole thread.

So: copy what is visible, paste, scroll a little, copy again, paste again. Each paste is added to the pool you already have rather than replacing it, overlapping comments are removed as duplicates, and a running total shows the count climbing toward what you expected. A busy thread usually takes a few passes.

Then run the draw. Veridraw picks the winner using a secret seed committed in advance plus a future round of the public drand randomness beacon, and publishes a certificate anyone can verify independently — which is what settles an argument about a TikTok giveaway rather than a screen recording of a spinning wheel.

Open the comments under your video, scroll until they are all loaded, select the comment area, copy it, and paste it into Veridraw at veridraw.io. There is no channel to connect and no API quota to worry about.

The YouTube web page mixes a lot of furniture into a copy — timestamps, “Reply”, reply counts, like counts, “Show more” — and Veridraw strips all of it, reconstructing the real comments and their authors from the paste structure. You do not clean anything up by hand.

After that it is the same everywhere: choose your rules, run the draw, and share the certificate. The free plan covers 1 draw a month with up to 200 comments and 1 winner; Pro raises that to 5,000 comments and multiple winners with ranked backups.

As with Instagram, subscriber status cannot be verified by any third-party tool — YouTube does not expose it. Veridraw verifies only duplicates and tagged friends, and never claims otherwise on a certificate.

Publish a commitment before the draw and a certificate after it, so the claim is checkable rather than trusted. That is the whole reason Veridraw exists, and it takes three visible steps.

First, before drawing, Veridraw freezes the entry list, fingerprints it with SHA-256, and shows you a hash of the secret seed it will use. You post that fingerprint publicly — to your story, your community tab, wherever your audience is. It is a promise they can hold you to. Second, the draw is bound to a specific future round of drand, a public randomness beacon operated by independent organisations, so the deciding number does not exist yet at the moment you commit. Third, after the reveal, the secret seed is published on a permanent certificate page.

Anyone can now check it: the certificate recomputes the winner in their own browser from the published values. If you had swapped the seed, it would no longer match the hash you posted; if you had edited one entry, the entry fingerprint would break. Both failures show in red on the page.

You can go further and run the entry pool live: a transparent overlay page can be added to OBS as a browser source so viewers watch the qualified pool build before the result exists.

Look at a finished certificate

There is no public evidence that the mainstream comment pickers rig their draws, and it would be a strange business decision. The real problem is narrower and unavoidable: with almost all of them there is no way for anyone to check, so the accusation can never be answered — a creator can only repeat that the tool was random.

A tool that generates its randomness privately could, in principle, keep re-rolling until it liked the winner, and nothing outside the tool would show it. The audience is asked to trust the operator, and the creator is asked to trust them too.

Veridraw removes the need for that trust rather than asking for more of it. The entry list is fingerprinted and the seed committed before the draw, the deciding randomness comes from a public beacon round that has not happened yet, and the finished result is recomputed in the reader’s own browser from published values. If the numbers had been touched, the check fails visibly.

So the honest answer is: assume nothing about any picker you cannot verify — and prefer one where verifying does not require taking anyone’s word, including ours.

How Veridraw compares

Four things, in this order: whether the result can be verified by someone who does not trust you; whether entries are handled honestly (duplicates removed, tagged friends actually counted, removals shown with reasons); whether the free tier is a real product or a crippled demo; and whether it promises anything it cannot deliver, such as verifying that entrants followed you.

Veridraw's free plan is 1 draw a month with up to 200 comments and 1 winner — and it is the full product inside those limits: all 5 draw themes at full quality, 3 stage backgrounds, full-screen recording mode, the live OBS witness overlay, and a complete public certificate anyone can verify. It carries a "verified by Veridraw" watermark and may show a short sponsor moment before the winner appears. No card is required.

What we limit is volume, never fairness or looks. The paid plans raise ceilings; they do not unlock the proof, which every free draw gets in full.

Every limit, in the open

Yes, for the core job — picking random winners from the comments on a giveaway post — and the difference worth knowing is verifiability. Comment Picker and the other established pickers produce a winner you are asked to trust. Veridraw produces a winner anyone can recompute from published values in their own browser, using a commit-reveal scheme bound to the drand public randomness beacon.

The second difference is price and shape. Comment Picker Premium publishes $95.91 a year ($9.99 a month), read from its pricing page on 2026-07-26; Veridraw Pro is €19 a year at launch, rising to €24. Veridraw is also paste-first rather than connector-first: nothing to authorise, and it works on any platform you can copy comments from, including ones with no API worth using.

Where the incumbents are ahead: they pull comments automatically from connected accounts, they have run for years at scale, and they cover more entry types (retweets, form entries). If automatic import from a connected account matters more to you than a verifiable result, they are the better fit today — that is a real trade-off, not a slight.

Side-by-side comparison

No, and the certificate is what proves it rather than us asking to be trusted.

The creator never touches the winner selection: the entry list is frozen and fingerprinted before the draw, the secret seed is committed as a hash beforehand, and the random ingredient comes from a public beacon round in the future — its value is unknown to everybody, including us, at the moment of commitment.

Because the seed was committed in advance, swapping it afterwards is detectable: the published seed would no longer match the hash that was posted before the draw, and the certificate would show that check failing in red. Editing a single entry changes the entry fingerprint and breaks the result the same way.

What the creator can do is choose which comments to paste in — which is why the qualified pool is published on the certificate for the audience to look at, and why the audience can watch the pool build live before the draw.

Because a random number nobody can check is just a claim. If the service generated all the randomness itself, it could in principle keep re-rolling privately until it liked the winner — and no one outside could tell.

drand publishes a fresh random value every few seconds, signed by a group of independent organisations, and every past round stays publicly readable. Binding a draw to a round that has not happened yet makes pre-selection impossible, and makes the ingredient re-fetchable by anyone afterwards.

If the beacon cannot be reached at the moment you draw, the draw waits and asks you to try again. It never falls back to a weaker source of randomness.

By copy-paste, on every platform. Open the comments on your post, expand them, select the comment area, copy, and paste into the giveaway form. Veridraw recognises the interface furniture each platform’s web page mixes in — timestamps, “Reply”, reply counts, like counts, “Show more” — and reconstructs the real comments from that structure, so you do not have to clean anything up by hand.

One comment per line also works if you already have a list, in the form “username, comment”. CSV works too.

Pasting is always additive: every batch is added to the pool you already have, nothing is replaced, and duplicates are removed automatically. The paste screens show a running total so you can see the count climb toward what you expected.

That is TikTok’s page, not a Veridraw limit: TikTok keeps only a handful of comments loaded in the page at a time and discards the rest as you scroll, so a single select-all can never contain the whole thread.

So capture it in batches: copy what is visible, paste it into Veridraw, scroll a little, copy again, paste again. Each batch adds to the pool, overlapping comments are removed as duplicates, and the running total tells you where you are. A busy TikTok thread usually takes a few passes.

The same technique helps anywhere a long thread is loaded gradually.

Open your post’s comments, then keep pressing “View more comments” and scrolling until the whole thread is loaded — Instagram only shows a slice of it at first, and anything you have not loaded cannot be copied.

Then select the comment area, copy it, and paste it in. Veridraw recognises the structure an instagram.com copy produces and pulls out the usernames and comment text.

If the thread is very long, paste it in a few batches as you scroll rather than trying to capture everything in one go. Batches merge, and duplicates are removed.

No, and no honest tool can. Instagram and YouTube do not expose follower or subscriber data through their APIs, so any product claiming to verify follows is either guessing or scraping.

We verify only what is genuinely present in the comment text: duplicate entries, and mentions or tags. If your rules say “tag two friends”, Veridraw counts distinct @mentions in the comment and filters entries that fall short, with the reason shown on each removed entry.

We never scrape a platform, and no certificate ever claims a follow was verified.

1 full draw per month with up to 200 comments and 1 winner — and it is the real product, not a trial: all 5 draw themes at full quality, 3 stage backgrounds, full-screen stage mode for recording, the OBS witness overlay, and a complete public certificate anyone can verify.

Free draws carry the "verified by Veridraw" watermark and may show a short sponsor moment during the build-up, before the winner is shown. Your history keeps the last 3 draws.

Pro raises the ceilings rather than unlocking beauty: unlimited draws, up to 5,000 comments, multiple winners with ranked backups, entry weighting, the full background gallery, unlimited history and export, no ads, and the watermark replaced by a verification seal.

See the full comparison

On a free draw the stage carries the full “verified by Veridraw” watermark — our branding on your recording.

On Pro that branding is removed and replaced by a small corner verification seal: a gold check, the words “provably fair”, and the short certificate link. It credits the fairness system rather than the product, and it gives your audience something to tap to check the result — which is what you actually paid for, made visible.

On Agency the seal can be switched off entirely or swapped for your own logo, with the certificate link kept where it is shown. Full white-label.

Open the certificate link. Your browser — not our server — recomputes the winner from the published values and shows a green verified state with each check listed: the committed seed matches its hash, the winner reproduces from the published values, the entry-list fingerprint is intact, and the beacon round matches the public drand value.

There is also a “was it really me?” box: type your username and the page tells you whether you are in the frozen pool and whether you are a current winner or backup.

If you did win, the page offers a share card that says you checked it yourself, so you can post the proof rather than just the claim.

You record a disqualification with a reason, and the next ranked backup is promoted into the winner slot automatically.

Nothing is hidden and nothing is re-rolled. The original draw result, its seeds and its frozen entry list are never modified — the certificate keeps verifying as it always did — and a “post-draw changes” record is added to the page showing the original winner, the reason you gave, and who was promoted. The audience sees the whole chain.

A reason is required. There is no way to quietly replace a winner, by design.

Yes, on Pro and Agency. You choose how many winners to draw and the engine also derives ranked backups from the same seed, so a promotion later needs no new draw.

Winners are revealed one after another on the stage, and the certificate lists them in order along with the backups behind them. The free plan draws one winner.

Yes, on Pro: entry weighting gives an entrant additional chances based on how many friends they tagged, up to a limit of ten.

It works like raffle tickets — a weighted entrant simply occupies more positions in the pool that gets frozen and hashed — so a weighted draw stays exactly as verifiable as a plain one, and the certificate shows the breakdown of entrants and weighted entries.

Yes, and that is the strongest way to use it. Before you draw, the commit screen gives you the sealed fingerprint to post publicly — the promise your audience can hold you to.

There is also a transparent overlay page you can add to OBS as a browser source: it shows the qualified entry pool scrolling with a live count while you prepare, then the winner when you reveal. Your viewers see the pool before the result exists, which closes the last gap in the chain — the commitment proves the seed, the overlay proves the pool, the certificate proves the arithmetic.

The stage itself has a full-screen mode with all the interface chrome hidden, built for screen recording, and Replay re-runs the animation on the same verified result if you need a second take.

No. Veridraw is paste-first on purpose: nothing to authorise, no app review, and it works on every platform — Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, X, or anywhere else you can copy comments from.

That also means we never hold access to your accounts. If a direct import lands later, pasting will stay supported as the universal path.

No. There is exactly one optional AI step: if you paste your giveaway caption, it can suggest the filter settings that match what you wrote — “tag two friends”, one entry per person, and so on. You review and confirm those settings before they apply, and you can skip the whole thing and set the rules by hand.

AI never judges entries, never excludes anyone, and never touches the draw. The filters that shape the pool are plain deterministic rules, and if a creator excludes anything after review, the certificate says the creator did it.

Pro is €19 a year at launch, rising to €24, and Agency is €99 a year. The usual comparison, Comment Picker Premium, publishes $95.91 a year ($9.99 a month) for a tool that asks you to trust it — the price was read from its own pricing page on 2026-07-26.

The difference is not a trick: one person builds and runs Veridraw, there is no sales team, and the fairness proof is cheap to compute. Pricing that low is only possible because verification does the convincing instead of marketing.

Pricing details

They are used to build your entry pool and to freeze the snapshot the certificate proves, and nothing else. No profiling, no resale, no AI training.

The certificate publishes usernames, counts and the fairness values — never the comment text itself. You can ask us to delete a draw, a giveaway or your whole account; deleting a draw also takes its public certificate offline, because the proof and the record are the same thing.

Read the privacy policy