Terms of use

Real Deal Productions · Last updated 12 August 2026

Real Deal Surf is free surf-contest software run by one person. It is free with no catch: no entry-fee cut, no per-event fee, no paid tier, no surfer minimum, and no card on file anywhere. These terms say what you can expect from it and what it expects from you. They are short because the deal is simple.

1. Who these terms are between

Between you and Makai Castle, trading as Real Deal Productions ("we", "us"), operator of www.realdealsurf.com. Using the site means you accept them. If you do not, don't use it — watching a contest requires no account and no agreement to anything.

2. The three ways people use this

• Spectators watch live contests and read results. No account, no terms beyond not attacking the site.
• Surfers hold a free account to sign up for contests and follow their own heats.
• Organizers (directors) hold a free account and run contests: they create the events, enter the surfers, assign the judges and publish the results. An organizer carries the extra responsibilities in section 5.

3. What it costs

Nothing. There is no paid plan, no trial that ends, no percentage of entry fees, and no feature held back behind a payment. Donations are welcome and change nothing about your account — they go toward the server bill.

If that ever has to change, existing organizers get notice before it does, and the ability to export everything first is guaranteed by section 6.

4. Your account

Keep your sign-in to yourself; you are responsible for what happens under your account. Give a real email address — it is the only way to get back in if you are locked out on contest morning. One person, one account. You must be old enough to hold an email account and enter into these terms; if you are a younger surfer, a parent or guardian holds the account (see Privacy → Children).

You can delete your account yourself at any time, from Account Details inside the app. We may suspend or remove an account that is being used to abuse the platform or other people on it — spam, impersonation, publishing someone else's contest, attacking the service, or entering deliberately false results into a public record.

5. If you run contests here

You are the organizer of your event, and this software is the tool you run it with. That means:

• The people in your contest are your responsibility. Entries, waivers, insurance, permits, safety, water patrol, minors, medical and every other real-world duty of running a surf contest sit with you. This platform provides none of them and does not check any of them.
• Only enter people's details if you are entitled to. When you type a surfer's name or email, you confirm you have the right to — the surfer's, or their parent's or guardian's, agreement. We will remove a person's details on their request, or their guardian's, without asking you first.
• Publishing is publishing. When you publish a contest, its draw, heats, scores and results become readable by anyone with the link and by search engines. Until you publish, only the name, date, location and division names of the event are public. You can unpublish an event right up until the first heat runs.
• Results you publish should be the ones you actually judged. Deliberately entering a false public result is a misuse of the platform.

6. Who owns what

Your contest data is yours. Surfers, draws, scores, results, seasons — you own it, you can export it at any time from inside the app as CSV, JSON, a printable heat sheet and a rankings sheet, and you can take it elsewhere. We claim no ownership of it and we will not use it for anything beyond running the service for you: no selling, no licensing, no training anything on it.

We ask for exactly one permission over it: to display it publicly on this site as part of the contest you chose to publish, and to keep serving it there so a link you shared keeps working. Delete your account and that ends, as described in the privacy page.

The software, the name Real Deal Surf, the design and the site itself remain ours.

7. Judging, results and disputes

This is the section that matters at a contest.

The software records a judging panel's decisions. It does not make them. Wave scores, interference calls, the tie-break when two surfers are level on every wave, and the decision to restart or reopen a heat are all made by people and entered by people. Where the app applies a rule automatically — trimming the high and low score on a five-judge panel, applying an interference penalty, running a countback — it is applying the rule the organizer chose, and the head judge remains the authority over the result.

Every protest, appeal and dispute about a result belongs to the event organizer and its governing body, under whatever rules that contest runs. We are not a judge of any contest, we will not adjudicate a placing, and being able to see the data does not make us a party to it. Do not contact us to overturn a result.

A published result can be changed by the organizer afterwards — a corrected score, a reopened heat, an amended placing. Treat the version on the event page as the current one, not as a certified final one, unless the organizer has told you otherwise.

8. What this service promises, and what it does not

Plainly: the service is provided "as is", with no warranty of any kind. There is no uptime guarantee, no support hours, and no service level.

Specifically, and worth reading before contest morning:

• It needs the internet. Judging happens on phones on a beach. If the mobile signal at your break drops, scores may not reach the server while it is down.
• Have a paper backup. For an event that really matters — a title, a qualification, a sanctioned result — keep a paper heat sheet alongside. Every experienced contest director already does. Print one from the app in one tap.
• Back your own data up. We take server backups, but you should export your own copy of anything you cannot lose. The export button exists for exactly this.
• Features change, and something you use today may work differently tomorrow. Substantial changes are recorded in the public changelog.

To the fullest extent the law allows, we are not liable for lost or corrupted data, a contest that could not be scored, a result that was wrong, lost entry fees, lost sponsorship, or any indirect or consequential loss. Since this service is provided free of charge, our total liability to you for any claim is limited to US $100. Nothing here limits liability for fraud, or for anything that cannot be limited by law — and if your local consumer law gives you rights that this section cannot remove, you keep them.

9. Ending it

You can stop at any time by deleting your account. We can suspend or end an account for the reasons in section 4, and we will say why. If the service itself is ever shut down, organizers get at least 60 days' notice and a working export for their whole league before anything is switched off.

10. The rest

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of California, USA, and the courts there have jurisdiction — unless the consumer law where you live gives you the right to your own local courts, in which case you keep it. If one part of these terms turns out to be unenforceable, the rest still stands. If we do not enforce something straight away, we have not given it up. These terms are the whole agreement between us about the service.

Changes to this page are stamped with a new date at the top; the significant ones are also in the public changelog. Continuing to use the service after a change means you accept it.

Questions

Email castlemakai@gmail.com. It goes to a person, who built this because paying $130 to score heats for a few friends was ridiculous.