Lodavo vs scratch tickets: what $5 a week costs in a year

A $5 scratch ticket every Friday adds up to $260 a year. About $174 of that comes back as prizes on a typical Canadian game, and about $86 stays with the lottery corporation. Lodavo vs scratch tickets is really a question about that $86. Both are a weekly chance at cash. One of them charges $5 a go, and the other is free and leaves the money in your own account.

What is the difference between Lodavo and a scratch ticket?

Both are a small chance at cash, repeated week after week. What differs is who pays for the prizes. A scratch ticket is sold to you, and the price is gone whether you win or not, because the prize pool is the players’ own money. A Lodavo ticket is free, awarded on savings you were keeping anyway, so Friday’s $5 is still in your account on Monday.

Over a year, those two add up very differently. There’s a table at the bottom of this page.

How much of your $5 comes back

Every game is printed with a fixed share of sales set aside for prizes, and the corporations publish it. In Ontario, OLG (opens in a new tab) puts the figure on each game’s fact sheet, where it runs from about 65% to 72.64%. Loto-Québec’s gratteux (opens in a new tab) return 62% to 67%. In British Columbia, where BCLC publishes the odds at every prize level but never the payout, working it out across the catalogue gives 52.25% at the bottom and 75.02% on the $100 ticket.

So somewhere between 25 and 48 cents of every dollar stays with the corporation. That isn’t a criticism of the product. A lottery has to keep a share or there’s nothing left to run it, and the provinces put most of what they keep into public spending.

The cheap tickets are the worst value

The payout climbs with the price, which puts the weakest games at the prices people actually buy. In B.C. every $1 and $2 game returns under 60%, while the $50 and $100 tickets both clear 74%. Ontario’s two $3 games sit at about 65%. The $5 ticket lands near 67% almost everywhere.

What 1 in 3 usually wins you

The overall odds OLG publishes (opens in a new tab) are about 1 in 3, and that’s the number that makes a scratch ticket feel different from a draw. You do win, often. What you win is usually small: on one $5 Ontario game, a third of the winning tickets pay exactly $5, so the prize is the price of the ticket coming back. Top prizes sit closer to 1 in a million, and OLG’s own fact sheets warn that some may already have been claimed by the time you buy.

What you get for the $5 you didn’t spend

Lodavo connects to the savings or chequing account you already use and checks the balance once a week, at 8 p.m. ET on Sunday. Every full $25 sitting there earns you one free ticket in that week’s draw. The money doesn’t move, so you can spend it tomorrow if you need to.

Seven evenings of finding out, instead of ten seconds

Each ticket carries seven numbers between 0 and 99. The winning numbers are picked in advance and locked behind a published hash before anyone chooses theirs, then revealed one a day from Monday through Sunday at 8 p.m. ET. Whoever has the most matches takes that week’s prize of at least $100, and seven out of seven takes $10,000. You can check afterwards that nothing was changed, on the provably fair page.

A scratch ticket gives you ten seconds and then it’s over. A weekly draw gives you a number to check every evening for a week. Slower, but there’s more of it.

Where the prize money comes from

Not from users. As you save, the app suggests financial products that might suit you, and if you sign up for one the partner pays us a referral fee at no extra cost to you. That’s what funds the draw. Ignore every offer and your tickets keep arriving. It’s the opposite arrangement to a lottery, where the prize pool is whatever the losing players put in.

Can you do both?

Yes, and neither one interferes with the other. Lodavo doesn’t open an account or take any money, so it works alongside whatever else you do with your Friday $5. Buy the ticket if you enjoy it, and the balance in your account earns its free tickets regardless.

Paying a few dollars for entertainment is a normal thing to do, and nothing here argues against it. The numbers above are just there so you know what the few dollars buys.

When a scratch ticket is the better buy

There are real things a scratch ticket does better, starting with speed.

• You find out now. Ten seconds against seven days. If the appeal is the scratching itself, nothing free replaces that.
• Nothing is required of you. No app, no sign-up, no connected account. Five dollars at the counter and you’re in.
• You can hand it to someone. A ticket works as a small gift or a stocking filler. A Lodavo ticket belongs to one account holder and can’t be shared or passed on.
• Small wins come back in cash. Ontario pays prizes under $1,000 at a lottery retailer, though a store only has to hand over $50 of it and sends you elsewhere for the rest. A Lodavo prize arrives by Interac e-Transfer or bank transfer once the claim steps are done.
• It returns more than a big draw game. A scratch ticket gives back considerably more per dollar than the big draws do. Lotto Max pays back about 48 cents on the dollar.

Where a year of the same $5 lands

Here’s the arithmetic on three common habits, using a 67% payout, which is roughly what a $5 ticket returns across Ontario, Quebec and B.C.

The right-hand column is the balance at the end of the year, and the ticket count is what that balance earns in every weekly draw from then on. On the way there, someone saving $5 a week collects around 255 free tickets over the twelve months.

The prizes column is an average across everyone playing, and most people land under it, because the top prizes pull the average up. A Lodavo prize is luck too. The tickets cost nothing, so a win is a bonus rather than something to count on. What isn’t luck is the right-hand column. That money is there because you didn’t spend it.

Canadians put about $10.5 billion a year through lottery tickets, roughly $309 for every adult in the country. None of that is a mistake. It’s worth knowing what the $309 buys, and that the same weekly feeling comes in a version with no price on it. If the idea is new to you, prize-linked savings is the older name for it, and Canada is late to it rather than first.

Want a number to check every evening without paying for a ticket? Get Lodavo free on the Apple App Store (opens in a new tab) or Google Play Store (opens in a new tab).

Terms and conditions apply. No purchase necessary (alternate method of entry available). Skill-testing question required. Open to legal residents of Canada who are the age of majority. Odds depend on the number of eligible entries received. Full rules and odds at our contest rules.