Terms & Conditions

Thanks for using Equack. These Terms & Conditions (the “Terms”) are the agreement between Derby Duck Races, LLC, doing business as Derby Duck Races (“Derby Duck Races,” “Equack,” “we,” “us,” or “our”), and you — the organizations, administrators, team captains, and staff who use the Equack platform to plan and run fundraising events.

We’ve written these in plain English on purpose. They are still a binding contract, so please read them. If you are accepting on behalf of an organization, you are agreeing on that organization’s behalf as well as your own.

These Terms cover people who run events on Equack. People who adopt a duck or donate through a public event page are covered by the event rules and refund policy published by the organization hosting that event, together with our Privacy Policy.

1. Accepting these Terms; who may use Equack

You accept these Terms when you create an Equack account, accept an invitation to an organization, or use the Services. If you don’t agree, don’t use Equack.

• You must be 18 or older to hold an Equack account.
• You must have authority to bind your organization. If you accept an invitation on behalf of a nonprofit, school, club, or business, you represent that you are authorized to enter into these Terms for that organization. Where these Terms say “you,” they mean both you personally and the organization you represent.
• Equack is invite-only. Accounts are created through an invitation from us or from an administrator of an organization already on the platform.

2. What Equack is

Equack is a software platform for planning, promoting, and running fundraising duck races and similar events (the “Services”). Depending on what your organization has enabled, that can include:

• Public event pages, sponsor pages, and content editing tools.
• Online duck adoptions, donations, merchandise, and sponsorship purchases, processed through our payment processor.
• In-person sales through the Equack mobile app and supported card readers.
• Team and peer-to-peer fundraising tools, including team pages, captains, referral links, and leaderboards.
• Communication tools — email and, where enabled, text messaging — for reaching donors, teams, and volunteers.
• Reporting, donor records, duck number assignment, and race-day tools.

We may add, change, or retire features over time. If we remove something your organization materially depends on, we’ll give you reasonable notice.

3. Accounts and invitations

Each person gets their own account — please don’t share logins. You are responsible for keeping your credentials confidential and for everything that happens under your account. Tell us promptly at info@duckrace.com if you believe an account has been compromised.

An organization’s administrators control who has access to that organization’s data, and at what level. Administrators can invite, change, and remove other users, including team captains and volunteers. When someone leaves your organization, it is your responsibility to remove their access.

We may suspend or remove an account that is being used in violation of these Terms, or where we reasonably believe there is a risk to donors, to other users, or to the platform.

4. Your organization's responsibilities

This is the most important section in these Terms, so we’ve put it plainly: Equack is a technology provider. We give your organization the software to run its event. We are not the operator, sponsor, or beneficiary of your raffle, duck race, sweepstakes, or fundraiser, and we do not receive the funds you raise as their beneficiary.

Your organization is solely responsible for:

• The legality of your event under federal, state, and local law. Raffles, duck races, sweepstakes, and games of chance are regulated differently in every state and often at the county or municipal level. Determining which rules apply to your event — and complying with them — is your organization’s job, not ours.
• Obtaining and maintaining any required licenses, permits, registrations, or bonds, including charitable gaming licenses and charitable solicitation registrations, and filing whatever reports those licenses require.
• Writing and publishing your official rules. That includes eligibility, entry methods (including any free-entry or alternative method of entry your jurisdiction requires), odds, drawing procedure, prize descriptions, and how winners are selected and notified. Equack provides tools to publish and run these; the content and the compliance are yours.
• The accuracy of everything you publish on your event pages — event dates, goals, prize values, sponsor claims, tax-deductibility statements, and any representation about how funds will be used.
• Awarding and fulfilling prizes, and handling any tax reporting or withholding associated with them.
• Your own tax and receipting obligations, including determining whether a payment is a deductible charitable contribution and issuing any acknowledgments or receipts donors are entitled to. Equack can generate receipt emails, but the contents and the legal accuracy are your organization’s responsibility. Nothing in the Services is tax or legal advice.
• Your relationship with your donors, including your refund policy, your privacy commitments to them, and responding to their questions and complaints.
• The conduct of the people you invite — administrators, team captains, and volunteers — when they use Equack on your behalf.

We may decline to support, or may stop supporting, an event we reasonably believe is unlawful, misleading, or harmful to donors. We are not obligated to review your event, and choosing not to act is never a judgment that an event is compliant.

5. Payments, fees, and refunds

Payments made through Equack — online and in person — are processed by Stripe. Your organization connects its own payment account, and Stripe’s own terms apply to that relationship. We never store full payment card numbers.

• Platform and adoption fees. Equack charges the fees described in your organization’s agreement or order form with us, which may include a per-transaction adoption fee. Those fees are netted out of the funds flowing through the platform, and the amounts in effect for your organization are visible in your admin.
• Processing fees. Stripe’s processing fees are separate from ours. Depending on how your organization configures checkout, a donor may be offered the option to cover them.
• Payouts. Funds are settled by Stripe to the bank account your organization connects, on Stripe’s schedule. We do not hold your funds.
• Refunds. Refunds are issued by your organization, through the platform, under your own published refund policy. Platform fees on refunded transactions are handled as described in your agreement with us.
• Chargebacks. Your organization is responsible for chargebacks, disputes, and any associated fees on transactions it processes, and for responding to them.

Unless your agreement with us says otherwise, fees are non-refundable, and amounts are stated in U.S. dollars.

6. Acceptable use

When using Equack, you agree not to:

• Run a raffle, drawing, or game of chance that is unlawful where it is offered, or operate without a required license.
• Make false or misleading statements about your organization, your event, how funds will be used, prize values, or the tax-deductibility of a payment.
• Use the platform’s email or text messaging tools to send messages to people who have not consented to receive them, or in a way that violates anti-spam and telemarketing laws (including CAN-SPAM and the TCPA). You must honor unsubscribe and STOP requests, and you may not upload contact lists you don’t have the right to use.
• Upload content you don’t have the rights to, or content that is unlawful, infringing, defamatory, or obscene.
• Process payments for anything other than your fundraising event, launder funds, or use the platform to evade payment-processing rules.
• Attempt to breach, probe, or disrupt the platform, access data belonging to another organization, scrape the Services, or reverse-engineer any part of them.
• Resell, sublicense, or provide the Services to a third party except as part of running your own event.

7. Content and intellectual property

Your content stays yours. Event copy, logos, photos, donor and team records, and everything else your organization puts into Equack remain your organization’s property. You grant us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free license to host, store, reproduce, adapt for display, and transmit that content — solely to operate and support the Services for you, including displaying it on your public event pages and sending it in messages you configure.

You represent that you have the rights to the content you upload, including photographs of identifiable people.

The platform stays ours. Equack, the Derby Duck Races name and marks, the software, designs, templates, and documentation are our property and are protected by intellectual property law. These Terms grant you a limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable right to use the Services during your use of them — nothing more. Feedback you send us is something we may use freely, without obligation to you.

Copyright complaints

We respect copyright, and we expect the same of the organizations using Equack. If you believe content on an event page or elsewhere in the Services infringes your copyright, send a written notice to info@duckrace.com (subject line: “Copyright notice”) that includes: your contact information; identification of the copyrighted work; the URL or location of the material you say is infringing; a statement that you have a good-faith belief the use is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law; a statement that the information in your notice is accurate and, under penalty of perjury, that you are the owner or authorized to act for the owner; and your physical or electronic signature.

We will review complete notices promptly and may remove or disable access to the material while we do. We will tell the organization that posted it, and they may send us a counter-notice with the corresponding statements; if they do, we may restore the material unless the complaining party notifies us that it has filed a court action. We terminate the accounts of repeat infringers. Written notices may also be sent to Derby Duck Races, LLC, 315 N. 10th Street, Columbia, MO 65201, attn: [designated copyright agent].

8. Third-party services

Equack is built on services provided by other companies. Their terms and privacy practices apply to their portion of the experience, and we are not responsible for their acts or omissions:

• Stripe — payment processing, payouts, and card readers.
• Clerk — account authentication and sign-in.
• Twilio — text messaging, including text-to-give.
• Resend and related providers — email delivery.
• Vercel and Neon — hosting and database infrastructure.
• PostHog and Sentry — product analytics and error monitoring.

9. Privacy

Our Privacy Policy explains what we collect and how we handle it, and is part of these Terms.

Donor and supporter information collected through your event belongs to your organization, and your organization decides how it is used within the platform. You are responsible for handling that information lawfully — including any privacy notices, consents, or deletion requests your donors are entitled to — and for keeping your own users’ access appropriate.

10. Availability and changes to the Services

We work hard to keep Equack fast and available, especially around race day, but we don’t promise uninterrupted service. We may perform maintenance, and outages at our infrastructure or payment providers can affect the platform. Where practical, we schedule disruptive work outside of peak event windows.

We may modify the Services. We’ll give reasonable advance notice of changes that materially reduce functionality your organization relies on.

11. Term and termination

These Terms apply for as long as you use the Services. You may stop at any time; if your organization has a subscription or agreement with us, its termination provisions control.

We may suspend or terminate access if you materially breach these Terms, if required by law or by a payment provider, or if continued service creates a legal or security risk. Where the circumstances allow, we’ll tell you first and give you a chance to fix the problem.

On termination, your right to use the Services ends. For a reasonable period after termination, we’ll make your organization’s data available for export on request. After that, we may delete it, subject to the retention obligations described in the Privacy Policy. Sections that by their nature should survive — fees owed, content and IP, disclaimers, limitation of liability, indemnification, and governing law — do.

12. Disclaimers

The Services are provided “AS IS” and “AS AVAILABLE.” To the fullest extent permitted by law, we disclaim all warranties, express or implied, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, title, and non-infringement. We do not warrant that the Services will be uninterrupted, error-free, or secure, or that they will meet your fundraising goals.

We do not provide legal, tax, accounting, or gaming-compliance advice. Nothing in the Services — including templates, checklists, suggested copy, or receipts — is a substitute for advice from your own professionals.

13. Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent permitted by law, neither party will be liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages, or for lost profits, lost revenue, lost donations, or loss of goodwill, even if advised of the possibility.

Our total liability arising out of or relating to these Terms or the Services will not exceed the greater of (a) the total fees your organization paid us in the twelve (12) months immediately before the event giving rise to the claim, or (b) one hundred U.S. dollars ($100).

These limits don’t apply to liability that cannot be limited by law. Some jurisdictions don’t allow certain exclusions, so parts of this section may not apply to you.

14. Indemnification

Your organization will defend, indemnify, and hold harmless Derby Duck Races and its officers, employees, and contractors from claims, damages, losses, fines, and reasonable legal fees arising out of: your event and its operation (including any raffle, drawing, or prize); your failure to obtain a required license or permit; your content; your communications with donors and supporters; your handling of donor information; or your breach of these Terms or of applicable law.

15. Governing law and disputes

These Terms are governed by the laws of the State of Arizona, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules. The state and federal courts located in Arizona have exclusive jurisdiction, and both parties consent to venue there.

Before filing anything, please email us at info@duckrace.com and give us thirty (30) days to work it out. Most problems can be solved with a conversation.

How disputes are resolved

If the thirty (30) days pass without a resolution, any dispute, claim, or controversy arising out of or relating to these Terms or the Services will be brought only in the state or federal courts located in Arizona. Both parties submit to the personal jurisdiction of those courts and waive any objection to venue there.

Both parties waive the right to bring or participate in a class action, class arbitration, or any other representative proceeding. Claims must be brought individually, in each party’s own name, and a court may not consolidate more than one party’s claims. Each party also waives any right to a jury trial to the extent permitted by law.

16. Changes to these Terms

We may update these Terms. When we do, we’ll change the effective date above. For material changes, we’ll ask you to accept the updated Terms the next time you sign in — you’ll see a short screen with links to the current documents before you continue.

Continuing to use the Services after an update means you accept it. If you don’t, stop using the Services and contact us.

17. General

These Terms, together with any order form or subscription agreement between us and your organization, are the entire agreement on this subject. If those documents conflict, the signed agreement controls. If a provision is found unenforceable, the rest stays in effect. Our not enforcing a provision isn’t a waiver of it. You may not assign these Terms without our written consent; we may assign them in connection with a merger, acquisition, or sale of assets. Nothing here creates a partnership, joint venture, or employment relationship. Neither party is liable for delays caused by events beyond its reasonable control.

You consent to do business with us electronically: clicking “I agree,” accepting these Terms on screen, or otherwise using the Services has the same legal effect as a handwritten signature, and we may provide these Terms, notices, receipts, and other records to you electronically. You may withdraw that consent, or request a paper copy of any record, by contacting us below — withdrawing it means you can no longer use the Services.

18. Contact us

Questions about these Terms, or about anything else? Email info@duckrace.com, or write to Derby Duck Races, LLC, 315 N. 10th Street, Columbia, MO 65201.