SaaS Knockout

Competition Rules

Last updated 25 August 2026

SaaS Knockout is a recurring knockout tournament between real software products. The community votes on a single subjective question — which would you rather try? A vote is a preference, not a technical assessment.

Prizes

There is no cash prize. The prize is attention: impressions, profile views, outbound clicks, a seven-day homepage spotlight for the champion, a permanent Hall of Champions entry and shareable assets.

Entry

  • There is always a free route into every tournament. No payment is ever required to enter or to win.
  • Paid Guaranteed Entry buys a place in a tournament. It does not buy a chance of winning, and it is not a wager.
  • All products are moderated before entry, whether they paid or not.
  • Paid places are capped at a minority of each bracket so they cannot crowd out free entrants.

Paid entry and visibility cannot buy a result

Paid entry and paid visibility never affect vote counts, vote weight, seeding, your opponent, integrity decisions or the winner. Paid placements are always labelled.

How the bracket is drawn

Seeds are assigned by a random shuffle you can verify. Before the bracket exists we publish a SHA-256 commitment to a random seed. When the bracket is generated we publish the seed itself. The shuffle is open source, so anyone can reproduce the draw from the published seed and confirm it was not arranged. Any manual change to a bracket is recorded and disclosed on the tournament page.

Voting

  • Voting is anonymous and needs no account.
  • One vote per person per match.
  • Votes are final. You cannot change a vote once cast.
  • The result is hidden until you have voted.

Rallying is allowed. Automation is not.

Asking real people to vote for you is part of the game — posting on X, emailing your customers, sharing in a community, colleagues voting once each. A large, one-sided, sudden wave of genuine humans is a legitimate result, not evidence of cheating.

The following are prohibited:

  • bots, scripts or any automated voting;
  • purchased votes or vote farms;
  • rotating proxies or repeatedly creating identities to vote again;
  • any technical attempt to manipulate the platform or attack a competitor.

Automated, purchased or manipulated votes may be excluded from the result, and abuse can lead to suspension or a ban from future tournaments.

Integrity review may delay a result

Every vote passes silent automated checks. Where traffic looks suspicious a voter may be asked to complete a visible “verify you’re human” step. Votes that fail these checks are quarantined and do not count.

Where a match shows anomalies, we may hold it for review before deciding it. A held match delays only itself and the match it feeds; the rest of the round continues. We aim to resolve holds within six hours and will say publicly when a result is delayed.

Ties

If valid votes are exactly level when voting closes:

  1. the match goes to overtime — up to three periods of 15 minutes;
  2. all overtime voters must pass the visible verification step, and anyone who already voted cannot vote again;
  3. if it is still level after three periods, the match is decided in this order:
    • more qualified outbound clicks in that match;
    • then the earliest first valid vote;
    • then the lower seed number.

No winner is ever chosen at random. The final step always resolves, and it is fair because seeds themselves came from the published random draw above.

Withdrawals

If an entrant withdraws or is suspended after the bracket is locked, its opponent advances by walkover. A walkover is recorded as such and is excluded from awards and vote statistics, because it is not a performance.

Awards

  • Champion — wins the final.
  • People’s Favourite — the strongest single-match vote share, among matches whose total vote count reached at least the median for that tournament. The threshold is a formula, fixed in advance, so it cannot be adjusted after results are known.
  • Most Clicked — the most qualified outbound clicks, counting one click per visitor per product per match per day.

The champion is not eligible for the two secondary awards, so three different products share the spotlight.

Changes

We avoid changing these rules mid-round except to deal with a security incident. Any material emergency change is recorded and communicated.

Contact

To report abuse or query a result, email [email protected].