For buyers

Buyers are the people who enter raffles to win prizes. You browse, you buy, you wait, you claim if you win.

The buyer flow

Browse. Visit /explore (no login required) or your dashboard Buyer tab.
Buy. Click into a raffle, hit Buy a ticket, sign once. You can buy multiple tickets across multiple raffles.
Wait. When the raffle ends, the creator settles. Switchboard supplies the random value, the program picks the winner.
Check. If you won, the dashboard shows a Claim prize prompt. If you did not, you can see who did and verify the draw on-chain.

Ticket price. Whatever the creator set, paid in SOL. Goes into the vault.
Rent. Each ticket creates a small Ticket PDA (~0.0016 SOL of rent). This is recovered if the raffle gets cancelled (refund_ticket closes the account back to you). On a settled raffle the rent stays on the Ticket PDA; closing it is a v0.2 task.
Gas. Solana network fee on the buy transaction. Typically a few thousand lamports.

A Ticket PDA keyed by ["ticket", raffle, ticket_number] recording your wallet as the buyer. This is your proof of entry.
Win odds equal to your_tickets / tickets_sold once the raffle is sold out (or at deadline).
Refund insurance. If the raffle does not hit its minimum, anyone can cancel and you can refund every ticket back to your wallet.

The raffle gets cancelled. Buyers refund. You get your ticket price plus the Ticket rent back.
The creator never settles. The raffle ends but stays in Active indefinitely. v0.1 has no force-settle path. The creator has soft pressure (no payout, no treasury cut) but no hard deadline.
The creator settles but you did not win. That is the deal. You can verify the draw was honest: see Verify a draw.
You won but never claim. The funds sit in the vault. Treasury and creator do not get paid until you run claim_prize. There is no auto-claim in v0.1. A v0.2 timeout will redistribute stranded prizes.

If you want the field-by-field walkthrough of buying, read Buying tickets.