Run an entire awards show
on one platform.

Frequently asked questions

The questions producers + procurement teams ask most often when evaluating Aclamos. Pricing, capabilities, integrations, and the 0%-per-entry promise.

What is Aclamos?

Aclamos is an end-to-end awards-show platform that runs the entire program in one place: open submissions with a custom form, charge entry fees via Stripe Connect, route nominations to a multi-round jury with weighted rubrics and calibration, run live public voting with twelve methods including ranked-choice IRV and multi-winner STV, drive the ceremony from a cue desk wired to OBS, ship verifiable Open Badges to winners, and reconcile finance with QuickBooks. We also publish a sister product, Ballotis, for organizations that only need verifiable voting (HOAs, AGMs, student gov, fan votes). Both products live in the same codebase and share the same verifiability stack.

Does Aclamos charge per nomination or per vote?

No. We charge 0% per nomination and 0% per vote on every plan, including the free tier. You pay a flat subscription (Solo $79, Growth $199, Studio $799) or a one-time Single Season fee ($499 to $1,999 for film festivals running once a year), and that's it. The fee your nominators pay you for entering goes to your Stripe Connect account, not ours. Stripe's standard transaction fees pass through at Stripe's rates, but we never take a percentage on top. This is the single biggest pricing differentiator vs. Submittable, Award Force, and OpenWater, all of which take a cut per submission.

Can I run a single one-time event without subscribing?

Yes — that's the Single Season SKU. Pay $499 (Lite, 250 submissions, 6-month window), $999 (Standard, 750 subs, 6 months), or $1,999 (Pro, 2,500 subs across 3 programs, 9 months) one time, and you get the full Growth or Studio feature set for the active window. After that, the org goes read-only — your data stays accessible, you just can't accept new submissions. It's the only one-time-payment option in the awards-software space and explicitly built for film festivals, foundation grant cycles, and annual industry awards that don't want a 12-month subscription commitment.

What voting methods does Aclamos support?

Twelve methods, every one production-shipped: single-choice (plurality), multiple-choice (pick-N), ranked-choice (instant-runoff voting / IRV), multi-winner STV with Droop quota, Borda count, Schulze beatpath (Condorcet-consistent), Copeland's method (Condorcet-consistent), score voting, approval voting, star rating, yes/no, and cumulative voting. The implementations have academic citations and Vitest coverage; we publish the algorithms in src/lib/voting-methods.ts and welcome public review. End-to-end verifiable mode is a per-poll toggle: every cast vote chains to the previous via SHA-256, voters get per-vote receipt tokens, and anyone can re-tally from the public chain.

Is the voting verifiable?

Yes, on every plan including free. Toggle verifiable mode on a poll and we hash-chain every vote: each cast vote's hash includes the previous vote's hash, the poll's chain seed, and the voter's receipt token. The chain is public at /verify/{pollId}; voters can re-verify their vote was counted; observers can re-tally from the chain without trusting us. This is the same primitive ElectionGuard and Helios use, simplified for non-cryptographer admins. We don't use blockchain — that adds complexity and gas costs without improving the cryptographic guarantee. The verification page is open-source and auditable.

Can nonprofits get a discount?

Yes, 25% off forever for verified 501(c)(3)s. Submit your EIN at /[orgSlug]/settings/billing/nonprofit; we look it up via the free ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer API and auto-approve clean matches in seconds. International nonprofits and organizations whose IRS records are out of date can upload their determination letter PDF — Anthropic Claude reads it, extracts the EIN, and we re-check ProPublica with the extracted value. Anything else queues for human review at our admin panel; typical turnaround is one business day. The discount applies to all Aclamos plans (Solo, Growth, Studio) and Single Season SKUs, billed via Stripe coupon.

Will I be charged in my local currency?

When you visit the pricing page from a UK, EU, Canada, or Australia browser, we show approximate local-currency prices alongside the USD price as a math-shortcut footnote. At checkout, if we've configured a local-currency Stripe Price for your plan, you'll be charged in that currency directly (Stripe runs the FX, no surprise on your statement). Otherwise we fall back to USD — Stripe still charges your card in USD, and your bank handles the conversion at their published rate. We're rolling out local-currency Stripe Prices incrementally; if your tier hasn't shipped one yet, the marketing footnote and the checkout currency may differ. Email support if you want a specific currency prioritized.

Can I migrate from Submittable, Award Force, or OpenWater?

Yes. We ship a CSV-import migration tool that handles the column-mapping for nominations, judges, rounds, and rubrics — the data shapes are well-known, so it's a guided wizard rather than a bespoke per-customer effort. Binary attachments (videos, PDFs) come over via a signed handoff from your existing storage to our R2/S3 bucket; this is currently a [ROADMAP Q3 2026] item — for now we provide a pre-signed URL list and your team or ours runs a one-time copy. We do unlimited free migration help on Growth+ for the first 60 days; book at /demo. The /compare/{slug} pages have head-to-head feature mappings if you want to see capability parity before committing.