Terms and
conditions.

1. What 195 Flags is

195 Flags sells squares in digital mosaics of the world's 195 national flags. Each flag is a grid of 62,500 squares. A square costs $1.99 and can hold a capsule: the buyer's name, an optional town, an optional message of up to 140 characters, and an optional photo. Buying a square means buying a permanent public spot in that flag's mosaic. It is a digital keepsake, not an investment, a currency, or a stake in any real property.

2. Purchases and payments

Payments are processed by Stripe. We never see or store your card details. You can buy one square or up to 50 in a single order, and the price is always $1.99 per square. A selected square is held for 30 minutes while you complete checkout; if payment is not completed in that window, the square is released for anyone to claim.

3. No refunds

All sales are final. Your capsule is sealed into the flag the moment your payment completes, which means the product is delivered in full at that instant. Because of that immediate and permanent delivery, purchases cannot be refunded, exchanged, or transferred. Please check your square, your spelling, and your photo before you pay.

4. Capsules are permanent and cannot be changed

Once sealed, a capsule cannot be amended, edited, moved, or deleted, by you or by anyone else. That permanence is the product. The one exception: we may remove or blank a capsule that contains unlawful, hateful, defamatory, or sexually explicit content, that infringes someone else's rights, or that contains personal data about another person without their consent. No refund is given for capsules removed under this rule.

By sealing a capsule you confirm the words and photo are yours to publish, and you grant us the right to display them on the site and in images of the flag mosaics indefinitely.

5. The completion draw

When every one of a flag's 62,500 squares has been sealed, we hold a live-streamed draw for that flag. One square is selected at random and its owner wins $40,000. Each sealed square in that flag counts as one entry, so an owner of ten squares holds ten entries. Entry requires a correct answer to the skill question asked at checkout. We contact the winner at the email address given at purchase; if a winner does not respond within 30 days of our first attempt, a replacement square is drawn. The draw result as streamed is final.

6. What information we keep and how we use it

Public, forever: your square's position, your name as entered, your town if given, your message, and your photo. Anyone can see these by zooming into the flag. Do not put anything in a capsule you would not want public and permanent.

Private, seen only by us: your email address. We store it solely to contact you about the completion draw for flags where you own squares. We do not display it, sell it, share it with anyone except the payment and hosting providers that run this site, or use it for marketing. Payment details are held by Stripe under Stripe's own terms and never reach our servers.

To ask about the data held against your squares, or to raise any other issue with a capsule, contact us at the email address on the About page and include your square numbers.

7. The service

We work to keep the site available around the clock but do not guarantee uninterrupted service. If 195 Flags ever shuts down permanently, we will publish downloadable images of every flag mosaic first, so the record survives. These terms may be updated as the service grows; material changes will be noted on this page. Continuing to use the site after a change means you accept the updated terms.