The Problem

If you've ever bought a scratch ticket, you've probably never stopped to wonder how many of the big prizes are already claimed. Most people don't — I didn't either, at first. But once I started looking into it, I realised that lottery corporations actually publish remaining prize counts for every active ticket. The information is there. It's just buried in tables on their websites, updated regularly, and never surfaced in a way that's easy to act on.

Scratch tickets aren't all created equal once they've been on shelves for a while. A ticket that launched six months ago with five top prizes may have zero left today — yet it's sitting right alongside brand new tickets where all the top prizes are still out there. Without knowing which is which, you're effectively buying blind.

I started manually checking the prize tables on the WCLC website before buying tickets in Western Canada. It helped. But it was slow, tedious, and impossible to do on the fly in a store. I wanted something faster — a single dashboard that showed me, at a glance, which tickets still had their top prizes intact and which had been largely picked clean.

Why I Built It

The goal was simple: give players the same information the lottery corporations already publish, but actually usable. No one should be spending money on a scratch ticket where the top prize was claimed months ago. That's not a secret — it's public data — but it takes real effort to find and interpret without a tool like this.

Beyond just spotting which prizes are left, I also wanted to track trends over time. Prize counts on their own tell you where things stand right now. But prize counts week over week tell you something more useful: how fast a ticket is selling, whether a top prize is barely moving (still plenty of opportunity) or disappearing quickly (worth acting on, or avoiding entirely). That historical layer is what turns raw lottery data into something genuinely actionable.

Scratchers Edge now tracks scratch tickets from four Canadian lottery corporations — WCLC (Western Canada), BCLC (British Columbia), OLG (Ontario), and Loto-Quebec (Quebec) — covering hundreds of active tickets with prize snapshots updated regularly.

Built with AI

I'll be upfront: I'm not a professional developer. Building Scratchers Edge was as much a personal challenge as it was a practical project. I wanted to see whether someone without a formal software background could build a real, fully functional web application — and I used AI as my coding partner to do it.

Working with AI to write and debug code was a genuinely interesting experience. It handles the heavy lifting of translating ideas into working code, while I focused on what the tool should actually do: what data matters, how it should be presented, what decisions a player needs to make. The back-and-forth of describing a feature, reviewing the result, refining it, and iterating was a surprisingly effective way to build something from scratch.

The scraper that collects prize data, the dashboard that renders it, the trend charts, the depletion calculations — all of it was built through that process. It's a genuinely collaborative way to build, and one I think more people will be doing in the years ahead. The fact that I was able to build something I actually use and find valuable — without a computer science degree — is part of what makes it worth sharing.

What This Site Is (and Isn't)

Scratchers Edge is an information tool. It helps you make more informed decisions about which scratch tickets to buy based on publicly available prize data. It doesn't guarantee wins, and it doesn't change the underlying odds printed on any ticket. What it does is put you in a better position than someone walking in blind.

If you use this site to stop yourself from buying a ticket with no top prizes left — even once — it's done its job. If you find the trend data genuinely useful for deciding which tickets are worth your time, even better. That's exactly what it was built for.

Scratch tickets are a form of gambling and should always be played responsibly and within your means. If gambling is becoming a problem, please visit responsiblegambling.org or call 1-800-522-4700.