HowToLoseMoneyFast
Visualize the real cost of playing the lottery.
Hey everyone,
The lottery is a scam. I built howtolosemoneyfast.com to stop people from playing by showing exactly how much money they would have if they invested their ticket money instead.
As a developer, I wanted to build something that makes the math impossible to ignore. The app runs a simulation using real historical draw data (like EuroJackpot since 2012 and Lotto 6aus49 since 1955) and compares your weekly ticket costs against a standard ETF over time.
For the build, I wanted maximum performance and a great developer experience, so I went with Astro and TypeScript. It was a fun way to ship a incredibly fast, lightweight site while keeping the simulation logic cleanly typed.
I would love to get your feedback:
Does the visual comparison between the lottery losses and the ETF gains hit hard enough?
How would you recommend getting this in front of everyday lottery players outside the tech bubble?
Thanks for checking it out!
3 Comments
Love the framing — visualizing expected value instead of just saying "lottery bad" actually lands with people who intellectually already know the math and play anyway. I've been building something adjacent from the flip side: a platform where every game has to be skill-based by law (Paraguay's regulations forbid chance-determined outcomes), so I spend a lot of time thinking about where the line between "skill" and "disguised chance" actually sits. Curious how you define that line for your calculator — does it treat all lottery formats the same, or do scratch/numbers/raffle get different EV treatment?
The comparison is much more compelling than simply telling people lottery odds are bad. Showing what the same recurring ticket spend could become over time gives the user a concrete alternative to compare against.