A giveaway run by a brand, an agency or a full-time creator is a different job from a giveaway run for fun. Someone in accounting will ask for an invoice with the company name on it. Someone in legal, or the client, will ask how the winner was chosen and whether you can prove it. The social media manager will ask whether the tool needs the brand's Instagram password (it must not). This guide covers what a professional Instagram giveaway picker has to get right, and how Pickfetti handles each point.

Key takeaways

Every paid Pickfetti draw can produce an invoice in your company's legal name with your VAT or tax ID, in seconds, from the draw page, after you have paid. Nothing is added to checkout, and there is no extra cost.
Every draw gets a public proof page with the rules, the counts, the random seed and a hash of the entry list, which anyone can re-verify. That is what you send to a client or a complaining entrant instead of a screen recording.
Pickfetti never asks for an Instagram login, password or Meta permission. It reads the public comments on a public post, the same way a logged-out visitor sees them, so it passes a security review without a conversation.
It works on any public post, including a client's or a collab partner's, and scales from a 500-comment post (free) to posts with hundreds of thousands of comments.
Rules are verifiable: tag-N-different-friends, keyword or hashtag, one entry per person, blocklists, date windows, and a follow check on the drawn winners. Likes and Story shares cannot be verified by anyone, and Pickfetti says so instead of pretending.

1. An invoice accounting will accept

This is the request we get most often from business customers, usually the day after they paid: "Can you send an invoice in the name of our company with our VAT number?" A card receipt in an employee's name does not clear an expense report in Spain, Mexico, Germany or most of the world. So the invoice is part of the product, and deliberately after checkout rather than in it: paying stays a single step, and the paperwork takes thirty seconds when you need it.

How to get one

Pay for a Draw Pass, an upgrade or a Growth Report as usual through Stripe Checkout. Nothing extra to fill in.
On your draw page, open Invoice and enter the legal company name, country, tax ID and address. Any national tax ID works: EU VAT, UK VAT, Spanish NIF, Mexican RFC, Brazilian CNPJ, Argentine CUIT, Australian ABN, Canadian GST/HST, Indian GST, Saudi and UAE VAT, US EIN and the rest. Where Stripe knows the format, the number goes on the customer record and prints in the invoice header; elsewhere it is printed as a line on the invoice, which is what accounting reads anyway.
A PDF invoice is ready in a few seconds, numbered, marked paid against your card payment, in the language of your draw. It stays linked on the draw page, and the "your draw is ready" email links it too. Entered a typo? Change the details and a corrected invoice is issued; the old one is credited so nothing is counted twice.

There is no charge for any of this, and no checkbox to remember at checkout. If something unusual is needed, a purchase order number, a W-9 for a US vendor file, email hello@pickfetti.com. Pickfetti is operated by CGHM Associates LLC, a US company, and prices are in US dollars.

2. Proof you can hand to a client or a lawyer

When an agency runs a giveaway for a client, "we used a random picker" is not an answer the client's legal team can file. They want to know who was eligible, which rules were applied, how the random choice was made, and that nobody could have steered it. A screen recording of a spinning wheel proves none of that.

Every Pickfetti draw gets a public proof page at pickfetti.com/d/{code}. It shows the post, the exact rules, the number of comments retrieved versus the number Instagram displays, the number of eligible entries, the winners and alternates in order, the timestamp, and two things most tools never publish: the random seed and a hash of the entry list. A JSON verifier at /d/{code}/verify.json lets anyone recompute the draw from those values. If a draw is redrawn, the proof page says so and lists the previous winners. The mechanics are explained in what makes a giveaway provably fair.

For the file: the entrant table can be exported to CSV at any time, with each comment's username, text, timestamp and eligibility verdict. Paid draws are kept indefinitely, so the proof link you put in the winner announcement still works a year later.

3. No password, no permissions, no security review

A tool that asks for the brand's Instagram login is a liability the moment a junior team member uses it, and a tool that asks for Meta API permissions needs a Business account, a linked Facebook Page and a sign-off from whoever owns that Page. Both are fine in their place. Neither is needed to pick a winner from public comments.

Pickfetti reads what any logged-out visitor can see on a public post: the comments, usernames, @-mentions and timestamps. There is no place on the site to type an Instagram password, and nothing to revoke afterwards. That also means it works on a post you do not own, which matters for collab giveaways and for agencies who never hold client credentials. The trade-offs of this approach (private accounts, hidden comments, likes) are covered in no-login versus official-API pickers.

4. Rules that hold up

Professional giveaways have terms, and the picker has to enforce the terms as written, not approximately. Pickfetti's rules are designed around what is actually verifiable from public data:

Tag N different friends: counted as distinct @-mentions per person across all their comments, so "@friend @friend @friend" is one tag, not three.
Required keyword, hashtag or emoji, including phrases with spaces.
One entry per person by default, or every comment counts if your terms promised that.
Exclusions: the post author is excluded automatically; add staff, the client's team and serial entrants. Pro accounts keep a saved blocklist across draws.
Date and time window, so late comments after the announced close do not enter.
Follow verification on the drawn winners and alternates. Anyone who provably does not follow the required accounts is skipped and listed; private accounts come back as unknown and are never rejected on a guess.
Offline and bonus entries (in-store customers, newsletter entries) can be added and are disclosed on the proof page.

What Pickfetti will not do is claim to verify likes or Story shares. Instagram does not expose either to anyone. If your terms depend on them, write the terms differently; our rules template and the walkthrough of Instagram's promotion guidelines show how.

5. Scale and speed

A brand post or a sponsored creator post can collect fifty thousand comments in a weekend. Pickfetti reads reply threads in full, keeps going in the background if you close the tab, and emails you when the comments are in. Posts up to 500 comments are free. Beyond that, a one-time Draw Pass covers one post: $4.99 up to 10,000 comments, $14.99 up to 100,000, and a priced-per-post pass for posts larger than that, which are collected over a day or two with live progress. Rule changes and redraws on a paid post never cost extra.

Agencies and creators who run giveaways every month usually land on Pro at $9/month or $79/year: unlimited draws with a pooled 100,000 comments a month, unbranded winner cards and reveal videos, unlimited redraws, a saved blocklist and a dashboard with every draw you have run. Pro is a subscription you can cancel from the billing page, and it is invoiced like everything else.

6. Data handling, in one paragraph

Pickfetti stores the comments it fetched in order to run the draw, show the entrant table and back the proof page. Free guest draws are deleted after 30 days; account and paid draws are kept until you delete them. Commenters are never contacted, profiled across giveaways or sold to anyone, and commenter data is never used for anything but your draw. Card details go to Stripe and never touch our servers. If a commenter asks to be removed, we remove them. The privacy policy has the detail.

What to look for in any professional picker

Need	Why it matters	Pickfetti
Invoice in the company name with VAT / tax ID	Expense reports and tax deductions need it	Yes, from the draw page after payment, any country, free
Verifiable proof of the draw	Client sign-off, disputes, platform rules	Public proof page with seed, entry hash and JSON verifier
No Instagram password or API permission	Security policy, client credentials	Never asked for
Works on posts you don't own	Client posts, collabs, sponsors	Any public post or Reel
Rule enforcement you can defend	Terms must be applied as written	Tags, keywords, one-per-person, blocklist, date window, follow check on winners
Exports for the file	Records retention, audits	CSV of entrants and verdicts; proof page kept for paid draws
Large posts	Brand posts run into six figures	Free to 500, passes to 100,000+, priced-per-post beyond
Unbranded assets	The client's name on the card, not the tool's	Pro, or the per-draw upgrade

Frequently asked

Can we put a purchase order number on the invoice?

Email support with the invoice number and the PO; we reissue it with the PO printed on it.

Can several people on our team use one account?

A Pro account is a single login today. Teams usually share it or run paid single draws from each person's browser; every draw of the same post is linked, so nobody pays twice.

Do you charge sales tax or VAT?

No. Prices are in USD and tax-exclusive; for business buyers outside the US the invoice carries your tax ID so your accountant can treat it under reverse charge where that applies. This is not tax advice.

Our client wants to see the entrant list before the draw.

Run the fetch, apply the rules and export the CSV before you press draw. The draw itself is a separate step, and the proof page records when it happened.

Do you also export comments for reporting?

Yes, through our sister tool IGComments: every comment on a public post to CSV, Excel or JSON, with the same no-login approach and the same invoice option after payment.

Ready to run one? Paste the post link; the first draw needs no account, and the invoice is one click away on every paid draw.