"No purchase necessary" explained for creators

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"No purchase necessary" is a description of your entry mechanics, not a disclaimer that fixes them. It means no entrant has to spend money — or, in some US states, give up substantial time or effort — to be in the draw. Where a paid route exists, the free alternate method of entry has to be genuinely free, disclosed as prominently as the paid route, and worth the same in the draw.

General information published by Dollar Fan Club — not legal advice. Read the full notice.

This page is about one element of promotion law — consideration — and the device used to remove it. What a lottery is, and what to do if you want a paid route at all, are handled in can you require a purchase to enter a giveaway.

Consideration: what entrants must not have to give up

Monetary consideration is the easy case: a purchase, an entry fee, a donation, a paid membership, a paid tier, a "free trial" that takes a card. It also reaches indirect spending — buying a ticket to the event where entry forms are handed out, or paying shipping to submit something.

Some US states also recognise non-monetary consideration, where an entrant is asked for substantial time, effort, or personal information rather than money. Where that line sits varies by state, is developed largely through state case law and enforcement practice rather than a single statutory test, and is genuinely unsettled at the edges. We cannot give you a rule that holds everywhere, and neither can anyone else.

What makes a free route real

If any route to entry involves money, publish an alternate method of entry. Free entry at every step is the part the law is concerned with. The other two properties below are how we and most careful operators build the route, because they remove the argument that the free option was nominal — they are not requirements you will find stated as such in the statutes cited on this page:

  1. Free at every step. No purchase, no payment, no paid tier, no card details, no paid account required to reach the form. This is the element the consideration analysis turns on.
  2. Equally prominent — DFC recommendation. Stated wherever the paid route is stated, in comparable placement and size, so nobody has to argue later about whether the free route was discoverable.
  3. Equal weight in the draw — DFC recommendation. One free entry counts the same as one paid entry. Weighting in favour of paid entrants makes the odds a function of money again, and how that is treated varies by jurisdiction.

Mail-in versus web form

The mail-in postcard is the traditional and most conservative alternate route: it is unambiguously free of platform and payment dependencies, and it creates a paper record. A free web form is far kinder to entrants and now the common choice, provided it sits outside the paywall and does not require a paid account. If you use a form, keep the same per-person limit as the paid route and log the submissions the same way.

Wording that survives scrutiny

Short in the post, complete in the rules. A workable pattern for the post:

No purchase necessary. Open to residents of [region], 18+. Free entry available — see official rules. Void where prohibited. Ends [date, time, time zone].

In the rules, spell the free method out as steps — where the entry goes, what it must contain, the deadline, and the limit per person — so an entrant can follow it without contacting you.

Three failures that show up after the fact

  • Asymmetric limits. Free capped at one, paid uncapped. We keep the cap identical on both sides.
  • Gated rules. If the rules or the free form are behind the paywall, the free route is not reachable by the people it exists for.
  • Retrofitting. Adding a free route halfway through leaves the earlier entries — taken when the only way in was paid — on the record. We would restart the promotion rather than assume the later change cures them; if a promotion has already run this way, that is a question for a lawyer rather than a fix we can describe.

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