Introducing Sweepsfolio, a suite of tools that my friend Lance and I developed to manage our sweepstakes gaming records. What started off as a simple money in, money out tracker quickly grew into a full fledged suite of tools with trackers, reminders, and calculators all designed to make sweepstakes gaming as easy as possible. What used to take me hours of meticulous spreadsheet sprawling, now takes a few clicks and some data entry and I’m good to go!
Sweepstakes Gaming
If you’re unfamiliar with sweepstakes gaming. It’s a relatively niche area of the internet where you can earn real money by playing casino games like slots and table games (blackjack, roulette, etc.). While I don’t promote gambling, I do promote sweepstakes gaming because it is not gambling, it’s arbitrage. The goal of sweepstakes gaming is to accept that you will lose money if you play these games and to use that to your advantage. If you can determine the exact amount of money that you will lose each time you play a game, then you can purchase a coin package with a discount that exceeds the amount you will lose to make money.
Purchase → Session → Redemption
It’s best to start with an example. Let’s say we purchase a deal 100 sweeps coins — sweeps coins are the currency sweepstakes sites use that can be exchanged for $ after being played through one time — for $80. Now, if we play a game that we know will lose 5% due to the house edge, we will lose 100 * 0.05 = 5 sweeps coins and be left with 95 sweeps coins. Since we played through all 100 sweeps coins, we can redeem the remaining 95 for $95. Since we spent $80 initially, we now made a $15 profit.
To track this in Sweepsfolio, we will first create a purchase to track money in, then start and complete a session to track playthrough, and finally log a redemption to track money out.
Purchase
First, create a purchase record using the Add Transaction dialog
Select the site you are playing on — we’ll say Pulsz since they have a game with 5% loss
Enter SC amount — in our case 100
Enter Price — in our case $80
Select Credit card — we can get a little cash back too 😉
Note: this requires adding a credit card in the Credit Cards page or during onboarding.
Sweepsfolio will
Calculate the discount of the package you are purchasing
Estimate the playthrough loss based on historical data of games we’ve played
Display the expected profit and return on investment (ROI)
In this case, our
Package discount is 20% (100-80)/100=0.2
Estimated playthrough loss is 5%
Classic Dice on Pulsz is usually around 5% loss rate although I added a manual override here since my past game data reports a 5.02% loss rate which would result in a $14.98 profit rather than a clean $15 that the example expects 😅
Expected profit is $15 with 18.8% ROI
This is a good deal!
Adding the purchase creates the record and it’s now viewable from the Purchases page
Session
Next we will create a session to track playthrough
In the same Add Transaction dialog, select the Session tab
Select the site — Pulsz
Select the game — Classic Dice
Starting date is auto set to DateTime.Now()
Ending date we will leave blank — this is how Sweepsfolio knows the session is complete.
Minimum Bet (SC) we will set to 0.20 — this is how Sweepsfolio calculates the number of plays we need to make
Btw, in order to minimize risk/volatility, always bet the lowest possible wager. You have a much better shot of reaching the house edge on 500 0.20 SC plays than 1 100 SC play.
Set Starting Total to 100 — Number of SC we purchased
Sweepsfolio will then display the number of plays needed to playthrough that amount
Clicking Add Session begins the session.
Heading over to the Sessions page, we can see the session is listed in the Active sessions table
Now we will playthrough the amount on Pulsz’s Classic Dice game.
The trick to this game is to set the expected outcome to over 5 so there is a 95% chance of making our money back.
Set the minimum bet to 0.2 to match our session and turn on auto play
Watch the playthrough amount in the sidebar update in real time to know when you’ve completed 500 plays.
I’m currently working on a chrome extension to track plays so hmu if you’re interested in beta testing! This will come in handy for sites that don’t have live playthrough amount updates like Pulsz does.
Once we’ve played through our entire balance, we will update our session to include our ending balance.
Go back to the sessions page in Sweepsfolio
Click the pencil icon on the active session for Pulsz
Set Ending balance in Play tracking to our balance after playthrough — in this case we went from 100 to 95 so we’ll enter in 95.
This will also set the Ending total input.
The loss rate is now displayed in the bottom left of the dialog — our loss rate is 5.0% (100-95/100=0.05)
If the value is green, it means the loss rate is lower than our average
If the value is red, it means the loss rate is higher than our average
Save the session to complete the session.
Redemption
Lastly, we will create a redemption to track money out
This can be done immediately after the session is complete in this handy “Add a redemption?” dialog that uses the session’s ending balance as the SC amount for our redemption.
We’ll just click add redemption, then head over to the Redemptions page to view the pending redemption.
A redemption can be pending or completed. When a redemption is pending, it means that we initiated the process to withdraw the money from the site, but we haven’t received the money yet.
Sweepsfolio will keep track of how long your redemption has been pending and even let you know if the redemption is taking longer than usual by tagging it as “Late”.
Pro Tip: using this info, you can reach out the customer support and ask them why it’s taking longer than usual.
Once you’ve received the redemption, click the check mark icon on the pending redemption record to mark it as received.
The record will now appear in the Completed redemptions table.
Profit Viewing
Now that we’ve completed the Sweepstakes lifecycle, we can view how much money we’ve made in several places depending on scope: the redemption detail page, site detail page, site overview page and the reports page.
Redemption Detail Page
To view the details of a redemption, click the detailed paper icon the table row of a pending or completed redemption on the Redemptions page.
The Redemption Detail page includes everything you need to know about a redemption including the Redeem amount, redeem date, received amount, received date, total profit (profit + cashback), profit (redemption - purchases), total purchases led to that redemption, total cashback, along with daily rewards, other rewards, and completed AMOE that led to redemption — more on these later.
Site Detail Page
If you click the site name on the Redemption Detail page, or really anywhere in Sweepsfolio, you can view that site’s detail page.
The Site Detail page includes everything you need to know about that site including minimum redemption, total profit (profit + cashback), profit (redemptions - purchases), total redemptions, total purchases, total cashback, total daily rewards and other rewards collected, and total completed AMOE.
It also shows how Sweepsfolio calculates the Site Balance that is used throughout the app.
Along with the records for each data type that can be tied to a site including purchases, redemptions, sessions, games, AMOE entries, daily reward claims, and other reward claims.
Site Overview
In the sidebar, click the Site Overview item to view the Site Overview page.
The Site Overview page lists every site you’ve selected for tracking as a card or a table row, depending on the view you have selected. Each record contains the site balance, most recent redemption, and best game. Sweepsfolio also adds a “Ready to play” badge to sites with a balance that exceeds the minimum redemption threshold. This is useful when determining which sites you need to play/redeem on.
Reports Page
In the sidebar, click the Reports item to view the Reports page.
The Reports page is the crown jewel of Sweepsfolio because you can use it to determine how much money you’ve made from overall and from each site during a given time frame. You can also export data to an Excel workbook if you need the data outside of Sweepsfolio.
The Reports page will display total profit (profit + cashback), profit (redemptions - purchases), number of records and amount of all activity types including redemptions, purchases, sessions completed, daily rewards claimed, other rewards claims, and AMOEs completed.
It will also display the most profitable sites in podium style and list style, where you can exclude sites from the report calculations and/or expand them to view the redemption and purchase records that contributed to profit total.
