About Find Competitions

What this site is

Find Competitions is an independent comparison site for UK prize competitions — the paid-entry draws for cars, cash, tech, holidays and everything else that have grown into a substantial industry over the last decade. We are not one of those operators. We don't run draws, sell tickets, hold anyone's money or pick winners. Every entry you make happens on the operator's own website, under their terms.

What we do is collect what operators publish and put it in one place, in one format, so two draws can be compared on the things that actually matter: what a ticket costs, how many have sold, how many exist, when it closes, and who is running it.

How the data is produced

Nothing on the site is a submitted advert that we republish unread. Listings are gathered automatically from each operator's own public pages, then normalised into a common shape. In practice that is four stages.

1. 1

   We read the operator's public listings

   Each operator gets a purpose-built reader, because no two competition platforms publish the same markup. Where an operator exposes a structured feed we read that directly; otherwise we parse the same competition pages a visitor sees. We only read pages that are already public — we don't hold accounts with operators or see anything behind a login.

2. 2

   We re-check on a schedule, per operator

   A scheduler runs every hour and refreshes the operators that are due, on an interval set per operator. Ticket sales are tracked separately and more aggressively: a live draw's sold count can be sampled as often as once an hour, easing off automatically on draws whose numbers have stopped moving so the effort concentrates on competitions that are actually selling.

3. 3

   We normalise it into one format

   Prices, ticket caps, sold counts and closing dates are converted into consistent units and UK time. Where an operator publishes only a percentage sold rather than a number, we convert it back against the ticket cap and label the figure as derived. Prize categories are assigned by keyword rules first, with an AI classifier filling the gaps that rules can't settle.

4. 4

   We retire listings automatically

   A competition drops out of search and category pages as soon as entries close or its draw date passes — the site only shows draws you can still enter. The sales history we recorded stays behind it, which is what lets us show how a draw filled up rather than just where it ended.

How operators are vetted

Prize draws sit outside the UK gambling licensing regime, so there is no regulator's register to check an operator against. Instead we publish what we can establish, and label how far that goes. Every operator we list carries one of three trust tiers, shown on their operator page and on each of their competitions.

A tier is a record of what we have checked, not a promise about how a draw will be run. Alongside it we show the operator's Trustpilot rating and review count where they have a profile, the year their listing started, and a badge for operators named on the government's voluntary code of good practice signatory list, which is published on gov.uk and sourced from there rather than self-declared. Listing an operator is not an endorsement of them, and we say so on every operator page.

How we make money

The site is free for players and there is no charge for an operator to appear in it. We earn in three ways, and it's worth knowing which is which when you read a page here.

Who runs it

Find Competitions is built and run by a small independent UK team. We are not owned by, funded by or affiliated with any competition operator, and no operator has any say in the trust tiers, rankings or editorial content on the site.

Messages sent through the contact form are read by the team, and corrections get priority — if a price, ticket count or closing date here is wrong, telling us fixes it for everyone using the site. We usually reply within one to two business days.