There are no sponsors, just a mother and son with a love of puzzles and poetry, willing to bet you won't solve ours before we break even. The jackpot prize pool for Snowball's Chance will be $10,000 plus $30 times the number of maps sold. For any of the other hunts we put up the prize pool.

The only people who have seen the solutions are the two owners (Maureen and Nick). The solutions are stored on a database managed within Amazon Web Services, which requires two-factor authentication to access. On the database the solutions are encrypted using a secure one-way hashing algorithm that automatically handles salt and prevents time-based side-channel attacks.
The individual who conducted a security audit for our site was provided temporary credentials and only had access before the correct solutions were entered into the database. (Your account passwords are encrypted the same way)

Not really, we are hoping to at least break even. As well as the prize there are fees for setting up the business and lawyers to make sure everything is fair. Any money from the sold maps beyond that will most likely go to prize pools for smaller, shorter-term treasure hunts. Mostly we are doing this for fun. We liked the idea of a treasure hunt, but the execution of previous hunts left something to be desired.

It varies, some of the clues will be easy, some will be very hard. You can always check how difficult we rate the hunts at the hunts page. For Snowball's Chance the clues are very hard, but there are clever people out there. We have set up this hunt as a sort of jackpot. The longer it takes, the more people will play and the bigger the prize will get. We are hoping it takes months or years to solve.
Meanwhile, we are doing some shorter hunts of varying difficulty levels.

The two of us start from the answer and then we research, research, research. We try to pack each clue with as much meaning as we can. Each word is deliberately chosen to convey as much meaning as possible. We try to avoid using any flowery filler. And we go back and forth like crazy arguing about which line is more clever cleverer more clever

No.

Only Canadian residents can play, but you can play from anywhere. You don't physically need to go anywhere of course, it is all solvable using google and your wits.

Nothing but the map and the internet. We won't give anyone additional information in any private forums. And you won't be required (or able) to buy progress with extra clues. Anything we say about the treasure hunt will be publicly available in order to keep it fair for all participants.

We can give you some examples, here are some we played with that have nothing to do with any active hunts. Click Here
For some previous solved riddles with keys explaining each line you can Click Here

Most of the images we create ourselves. Either through photographing items we find or make or through painting. My mother is quite the artist.
In a few instances we used public domain photos.
Notably the bear in the Ballyhoo clue was modified from here
Thank you to artists like George Hodan for providing images free of charge for those of us on a budget!
We also used several of Rebecca Read's images for borders. You can find her stuff here