The campaign builder is flexible and embedding the voting contest on our WordPress site was straightforward. Setting up a video contest with public voting and email verification worked as described, and the entry moderation before publishing was useful. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Two serious problems overshadowed everything else.
First, the anti-fraud protection did not work. We ran a public music contest and, after voting closed, a full audit revealed 306 fraudulent votes — disposable/temp-mail addresses, machine-generated email aliases, and coordinated bursts from single network blocks. Fraud detection is advertised as a feature of the platform, yet not one of these 306 votes was stopped or flagged. Worse, every piece of detection — a disposable-domain blocklist, alias pattern recognition, network clustering — I had to design and implement myself. Without that effort, the integrity of our contest would have been destroyed.
Second, and even more disappointing: support never replied. I sent four detailed, polite emails over several weeks documenting the fraud and requesting clarification and a refund. I received no response at all — not one reply, not even an automated acknowledgement. For a paid service, being ignored completely across four emails is unacceptable. Honestly, for this contest the value did not match what we paid. We were on a paid plan specifically for the anti-fraud protection and email-verified voting — that was the core reason we chose ShortStack over cheaper options. The embedding, entry collection and moderation worked fine and were reasonably worth the price, but the one feature we were really paying for, fraud detection, failed to catch any of the 306 fraudulent votes we later found ourselves. When you add the complete lack of support (four emails, zero replies), the price stopped feeling justified: we ended up doing the fraud-detection work ourselves, which is exactly what the subscription was supposed to cover. For basic contests the value is probably fair, but if you're paying for the fraud-protection tier expecting it to safeguard a vote that matters, it did not deliver the value for us. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
