Terms of use

The Expys is run by Wiktis Pty Ltd, an Australian company (ABN as printed on our invoices). In these terms "we", "us" and "our" mean Wiktis Pty Ltd, and "you" means the person using the site, and any organisation you enter, vote, buy or post for.

These terms cover expys.org and expoawards.org, the programmes on them (the Expo Awards, the Executive Awards, the Entrepreneur Awards and The Expys Global), the member portal, and every email and text we send from them. Some things have their own terms as well, and where they do those apply on top of these: the ticket terms for the live nights, the media drop terms for footage and photographs you send us, and the rules of each programme.

By using the sites, entering, nominating, voting, buying or sending us anything, you agree to these terms. If you do not agree, please do not use the sites.

You sign in with an emailed link or code, a password you set, or a Google or LinkedIn account. One account works across all three programmes and lives on expys.org; expoawards.org hands you across to it. You can add or remove a sign-in method in your portal, as long as one is left.

When you sign in with LinkedIn we take the name LinkedIn gives us and copy the profile photo into our own storage, because a LinkedIn photo address expires. You can replace both in your portal.

You are responsible for what is done under your account. Keep your sign-in to yourself, and tell us at once if you think somebody else is using it.

You must be at least 18 to hold an account or to buy anything. Nomination and voting are open to anyone with an email address they can prove is theirs.

Every award is entered by paying the entry fee for it, then completing your entry. The fee is per award, per region, and it is shown before you pay. Every price on the site is written in United States dollars and is exclusive of tax.

As at 27 September 2026 the entry prices are: a team member, US$49; a show, US$99; an exhibitor award, US$99; Host of the Year, US$99; an organiser award, US$199; a supplier category, US$199; an Executive or Entrepreneur Awards category, US$99. The price you pay is the price shown at the moment you pay, and a change to this list never applies backwards.

Entry is by self-declaration. You tell us that what you enter is true, that you are entitled to enter it, and that you have the permission of anybody you name. We do not ask for documents. Applications are reviewed, and an entry that is not approved is refunded in full (see Refunds).

An entry fee is one-time. There are no early-bird or multi-category discounts, though a promotion code we issue may take an amount off at checkout.

A regional award is presented only if it receives five or more paid entries. Below that, entries roll into the region's broader award, and you are told this before you pay.

Every payment on the site is taken by Stripe, on a Stripe Checkout page. We never see or hold your card number. Stripe's own terms and privacy policy apply to the payment itself.

We are registered for GST in Australia and nowhere else. If you are based in Australia, 10% GST is added as its own line at checkout on top of the price shown. If you are outside Australia the supply is a GST-free export and nothing is added. Where nothing in the flow has told us your country, no GST is charged and the fact that the country was unknown is recorded against that payment, so it can be corrected rather than guessed.

Your country is the one on your account ("Where are you based?"), which you answer once and can change in your portal. It decides tax and the currency a price is shown in. It is not the region you enter an award in.

Entry fees are charged in United States dollars. Live night seats and tables are charged in the currency of the city (US, Australian, Canadian or Singapore dollars, or pounds sterling).

Every payment gets a receipt from Stripe and an invoice in your portal, under Billing and invoices, which you can print or save. The invoice names the seller, its ABN where set, and the GST treatment of that payment.

While the site is behind its launch password we may run a test charge: every line on a checkout is charged a fixed test amount (50 cents, plus GST where it applies) instead of its price, so that we can put a real card through the real Stripe account and watch it land. A purchase made at the test price is recorded as a paid order at that price. The test amount cannot apply once the site is public.

Every entry fee is 100% refundable if your application is not approved. An entry fee is also refundable if the category is withdrawn, provided you ask within 14 days of being told. Otherwise an entry fee is not refunded because you changed your mind, but ask us anyway and we will do what we can.

A refund goes back to the card you paid with, in full, and we do not keep a fee out of it.

Press packs, team packs and entry credits are refundable on the same footing as the entry they attach to. Live night seats, tables and add-ons are covered by the ticket terms.

Nothing here takes away a right the law gives you. Our services come with guarantees that cannot be excluded under the Australian Consumer Law, and if something is not supplied with due care and skill, or is not what we described, you may be entitled to a refund or another remedy whatever these terms say. If you buy from outside Australia you also keep every right the consumer law of your own country gives you.

Whether a refund asked for late is capped by a deadline, and if so what it is, is [to confirm].

Every award is decided by public vote. There are no judges. One vote per person, per award, confirmed by clicking the link in the email we send you; a vote that is not confirmed is not counted. We limit votes to three per email address and twenty per connection a day, and we keep a salted hash of the connection and browser to spot bulk or automated voting.

The vote opens with entries and closes region by region before each live night, on the dates published on the site. Finalists are the entries with the most counted votes in each attendance band, and the finalist with the most counted votes wins. The count is independently certified. No running total is published anywhere.

Bot, bulk, traded or bought votes are flagged and removed, and we may disqualify an entrant for vote manipulation. Sponsors never vote and never see the count.

Nothing you can buy on this site affects the vote. A press pack, a team pack, a media kit or a seat at a night is promotion and nothing else, and no pack name implies a better class of nominee.

A voter wall, which would list the names of voters who chose to be named, is built but switched off. If it is switched on, a voter is only ever named with their own consent, given at the moment they vote, and can take their name off it with one click.

A paid entry gives you a public page: your name, title, company, photo, tagline and the awards you are entered for. It goes live when you press Put my page live, once the profile fields we need are filled in, and you can take it down at any time. Votes already counted stay counted when a page is hidden.

You can prove the profiles you link (LinkedIn by signing in with it, Instagram by commenting on our pinned post from that account, a website by a code we give you). A profile we could not check is never shown as verified.

You are responsible for everything on your page and in your entry. It must be true, it must be yours to post, and it must not be unlawful, defamatory, misleading, or in breach of anybody else's rights. We may take a page down, or edit it, where we think it is any of those things, and we will tell you when we do.

You give us a worldwide, royalty-free licence to show your page, your name, your photo and your entry on our sites, in the newsroom, in our emails, on our social channels and in our advertising, for as long as you are entered and for the purpose of running and promoting the awards. You keep ownership of everything you post.

Every paid entrant gets a free press release in The Expys Newsroom at expys.org/news. A press pack, bought on top, puts that release on a newswire as well and, at the higher tiers, buys named placements in outlets on our rate card. The pack you hold and what it includes are shown before you pay, and you can move up the ladder later paying only the difference.

We say "distributed on a newswire that syndicates to outlets including" and never "featured in", because a wire puts a release on an outlet's syndication feed; it does not put a story in the paper. A sponsored placement is always labelled sponsored. Publications named beside a pack do not sponsor, endorse or partner with The Expys; we name them to say truthfully where a placement can be bought.

A release is written from a short interview you answer in your portal. The first draft is produced by a machine: your answers and the name of your award are sent to Anthropic's Claude API, which returns a draft. The draft is then read, edited and approved by our copywriters and publicists before you see it, and nothing is published until you press Accept on the approved version. You can ask for a redraft, and every draft is kept so you can go back to an earlier one. The machine is told never to invent a fact, and anything you did not give us is left as [to confirm] for the desk.

You warrant that what you tell us in the interview is true and that we may publish it. We may decline to publish a release, or take one down, where we think it is untrue, unlawful or damaging, and we will tell you why.

Press packs are promotion only. They never affect the vote.

Material you drop from your portal (a highlight reel, a showreel, a photograph, a document) is covered by the Media Drop Terms at expys.org/terms/media, version 2026-09-28.1, which you agree to at the moment you drop it. In short: you keep ownership; you give us a worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual licence to use, cut, caption and publish it wherever we promote The Expys and the people in it, including with our partners; you tell us it is yours to give, that everybody identifiable in it agreed to be filmed, and that there is nothing unlawful, nothing sexual and nothing depicting a minor in a sexual way in it. Every drop is reviewed by a person before it is used, and nothing you drop is published automatically.

Show footage sent through Submit your reel is covered by the highlight reel licence shown on that form and stored with your submission: the same non-exclusive, perpetual licence, and the same warranty that the footage is yours to license.

If you believe material on our sites infringes your rights, write to media@expys.org with the address of the page and what you own. We will take the material down while we look into it.

The live nights have their own ticket terms at expys.org/tickets/terms, which apply to every reservation, seat, table and add-on. In short: a reservation costs nothing and is not a ticket; a city goes on sale when its date and venue are set; a seat admits one person to one night; a table of ten can be held with a 25% deposit with the balance charged 60 days before the night; and a material change (the night cancelled, the date moved, the city moved) gives you the choice of a full refund.

Every seat and table shows Buy now and Reserve. Buy now takes payment through Stripe; Reserve takes no card and holds your place until the city confirms.

Some nights are also listed on Eventbrite, LinkedIn and Facebook. A link from those listings brings you to this site to buy; we do not sell through Eventbrite and Eventbrite's terms do not apply to a purchase made here.

A sponsorship package is reserved on the site and paid through Stripe, in full, as a 25% deposit with the balance 30 days later, or, above the threshold shown, in three instalments 30 days apart. A reservation holds the package for the window shown; if the deposit is not paid in that window the package goes back on sale.

A sponsor never receives our audience list and never sees the vote. What a sponsor is told is counts: how many of a room want a live band, how many pressed Interested on the golf day. The one place a sponsor is given names is a lunch or a table they host, where they are told who sat there.

The full sponsorship agreement for a package, including what is delivered and by when, is [to confirm] and will be sent with the invoice.

A member may become an affiliate from their portal and earn a commission on the entries and purchases their link refers, under the affiliate terms at expys.org/terms/affiliates, which they agree to when they join. Commissions are recorded in a ledger and paid by hand. An affiliate link never changes a price, a vote or a result.

We send transactional email (sign-in links, receipts, vote confirmations, the state of your entry) because the site cannot work without it, and lifecycle email (reminders, results, invitations) which you can stop with the unsubscribe link in every one of them. Nominations come from a nominations mailbox; a sign-in link takes no reply.

Text messages are sent only if you tick the box that says so, up to four a month, never between 8pm and 9am in your time zone, and every one can be stopped by replying STOP.

You can delete your account from your portal, under More, at any time. It is a two-step door: what happens is set out in plain words, you type DELETE, and it is done. It is permanent.

Deleting your account removes your sign-in and anonymises your personal data everywhere we hold it: your name, email address, phone, photo, logo, social links and every word you wrote about yourself, your uploaded media and any press release drafts. Your public page comes down.

What stays, because the law and Stripe require it, is the record of what you paid for: orders, receipts, invoices and tax records, kept against an anonymised member id rather than your name. Votes you have already cast stay counted. Show footage you licensed to us stays under that licence, with your contact details removed. One record of your email address is kept on our do-not-contact list so that we never email you again. The privacy policy sets all of this out in detail.

You must not use the sites to do anything unlawful, to harass anybody, to post anything you do not have the right to post, to buy, trade or automate votes or nominations, to scrape the sites, or to interfere with how they run. You must not enter or nominate a company you are not entitled to, and no company owned by Wiktis, and no company any of us hold an interest in, may enter or be nominated in any category.

We may suspend or close an account, remove an entry, a page, a release or a vote, or refuse an entry, where we reasonably think these terms or a programme's rules have been broken. Where we do, we will tell you why, and a paid entry removed for breach is not refunded.

The Expys name, the Expy mark, the gold lockups, the programme names and the design of the sites are ours. The badges, tiles, captions and media kit we give a paid entrant are for promoting their own entry, and may be used for that purpose on their own channels and nowhere else. Nothing on the sites may be copied for another awards programme.

We run the sites with due care and skill and we describe what we sell truthfully. Beyond that, to the extent the law allows, we are not liable for loss that is indirect, or that we could not reasonably have foreseen, or that comes from something outside our control (a venue, a newswire, an outlet, a payment network, an ad platform, the internet).

Where the law allows our liability to be limited, it is limited to the amount you paid us for the thing the claim is about in the twelve months before it. The Australian Consumer Law carve-out in the Refunds section applies to everything in these terms.

The liability position in these terms, including the cap, is [to confirm] with a lawyer before launch.

These terms are governed by the law of Victoria, Australia, and the courts of Victoria, Australia have jurisdiction, without taking away any right the consumer law of your own country gives you.

We change these terms when the site changes, and the date at the top is the date of the version you are reading. A change to a price, a fee or a refund position never applies to something already paid for. The version you agreed to for a purchase is the one on this page on the day you paid, and a short note of what changed is kept at the foot of this page.

Wiktis Pty Ltd (Australia). About these terms or anything you bought: hello@expys.org. About your data: privacy@expoawards.org. About a rights claim on footage: media@expys.org.