Is this actually accurate, or is "hash your grocery list into lottery numbers" just a bit?
Both. The hashing is real — SHA-256 via the Web Crypto API, rejection-sampled so there's no bias toward any number. The ticket prices are real, pulled from official sources. The historical draws are real, pulled from actual state lottery data and community-maintained archives. The bit is that any of this matters, because it doesn't — your hashed numbers are exactly as random, and exactly as losing, as numbers you'd pick yourself.
A ticket twice a week doesn't sound like much. Why does the app make such a big deal of "saving" it?
Take Mega Millions specifically, since it deserves the callout: two drawings a week (Tuesday and Friday) at $5 a ticket since the 2025 price hike. That's $10 a week, $520 a year — a boring number to look at once and a very different number to look at compounded. Put it in a plain index fund at a realistic long-run return — nothing's guaranteed, this isn't investment advice, past performance etc. — and in 20 years you're looking at somewhere around $19,000–$24,000. In 30 years, more like $41,000–$59,000. That's not a private jet. It's a real emergency fund, most of a house down payment, or a lot of years where a flat tire doesn't become a financial crisis. The lottery version of that same $520/year is, on average, negative — you're paying for the feeling of a chance, not the chance itself, and Mega Millions currently charges more for that feeling than almost anyone else.
So is this app just financial literacy content wearing a costume?
Kind of, yeah. Sorry. It's dressed up as a joke because "invest your discretionary income instead of gambling it" is a sentence people have heard about four billion times and ignored about four billion times. The hope is that six fake lottery balls and a losing streak counter make it land differently. If not, at least the balls were fun.
Isn't the lottery basically a tax on people who are bad at math?
No, and that line is meaner than it sounds. Most regular players know the odds are bad. They play anyway because a small, cheap, socially normal shot at total financial transformation is more emotionally available than "keep grinding for thirty years toward a modest retirement" — especially if you're already stretched thin. That's not innumeracy, it's a rational response to a genuinely bad set of options, sold back as entertainment. The real criticism belongs on a system that advertises hardest in the neighborhoods that can least afford to lose, not on the person buying the ticket.
What are my actual odds of winning the jackpot?
Depends on the lottery, but for Mega Millions — which, again, now costs $5 a ticket and draws twice a week — it's about 1 in 290,472,336. (Powerball is barely better at 1 in 292,201,338, for what that's worth, which is nothing.) The commonly cited lifetime odds of being struck by lightning in the U.S. are about 1 in 15,300 — meaning you're roughly 19,000 times more likely to get struck by lightning at some point in your life than to hit a single Mega Millions jackpot. The app's odds-comparison flavor text isn't exaggerating for effect. The real numbers are already absurd enough that exaggeration would be redundant.
Do people actually buy multiple tickets for the same drawing, or is "buying dozens" an exaggeration?
Not an exaggeration — it's closer to the median than the exception. According to a 2022 PlayPennsylvania survey of over 1,100 lottery players, roughly two-thirds buy more than one ticket per drawing, and about one in four buy five or more when the jackpot gets big. The magical thinking was never "buying a ticket." It's the belief that buying five, or fifty, meaningfully improves your odds instead of just meaningfully improving your losses — your odds barely move, but your exposure to every drawing does. That's exactly what the Tarot Deck models: every ticket you generate keeps getting checked against every future drawing, so if you play the way most real players do, you can watch your own numbers and your own costs pile up side by side.
Does "Check My Numbers" actually check against real winning numbers?
Yes — for Powerball, Mega Millions, and EuroMillions, "Fetch Latest Draw" pulls the actual most recent official results and checks every ticket in your entire deck against it, for real, including real prize amounts where that data exists. The "History Check" goes further and checks your whole deck against the last 10–104 real draws at once. Every other lottery on the list doesn't have a reliable free public API, so those stay manual-entry. This is a website built by someone with unreasonably strong opinions about not making up data.
Is my data being sent anywhere?
No. Everything — the hashing, your savings tally, your badges, your ticket history — lives entirely in your browser's local storage. The only network calls this app makes are to fetch real lottery results, real quotes, real Bible verses, real recipes, and so on. Nothing about you or your input text is sent anywhere or stored on a server, because there isn't one.
Okay, but what would you actually do with a billion dollars?
Great question, glad you asked — see the About page. Short version: not a mansion. A few new enemies, acquired specifically so I can afford to crush them, and one (1) funeral for a stranger where I get to whisper something ominous. I contain multitudes, none of them fiscally responsible.
Isn't it a little hypocritical to spend this whole app telling me to keep my $2, then ask for a tip at the bottom?
A little, yes — and I'm aware that's exactly the kind of thing someone asking for money would say. The difference is disclosure. The lottery sells a 1-in-292-million shot while implying it's closer to a coin flip. This app tells you the real odds, the real prices, and then just... asks. No manufactured hope, no jackpot fantasy, no dopamine engineering. Just a link. You can say no. That's the whole point.
Wait — isn't this whole app just your lottery ticket?
Yes, obviously, and I'd be a hypocrite not to admit it. The odds that this specific combination of hash functions and lottery balls "hits" — gets shared around, and someone actually clicks the coffee link — are not meaningfully better than the odds this app spends its entire existence making fun of. I built a satire of magical thinking about money, and then I personally engaged in some magical thinking about this app being my money. I see the bit. I'm doing the bit anyway. At least my version doesn't cost $2 to enter.
How much coffee have you actually had while building this?
Let's just say the "buy me a coffee" link is less "please fund my caffeine habit" and more "please help fund a caffeine habit that already exists, independently of you, and will continue regardless of what you decide here." I don't know the exact number. I know it's not a number I'd want cross-referenced against a resting heart rate.