Play the lottery for free!

You could make millions without having to hand over a penny!

I play the National Lottery by direct debit, and am terrible at remembering to check the numbers each week. So whenever I see that I have an email in my inbox from the Lottery, my heart skips a beat.

How many numbers did I get? Am I now rich? Is there anyone within earshot who will hear me loudly swear when I discover, upon logging into the National Lottery website, that I actually only won £10?

I only play the main game so it doesn’t cost too much, but if I wanted to keep up with all the various different games, from Thunderball to the Health Lottery, it would cost me a fortune.

However, there’s now a way for you to play the National Lottery, absolutely free!

Who needs cashback?

A new site, freenationallotterytickets.co.uk has launched, which operates on the same basis as traditional cashback websites like Quidco or TopCashback. However, the difference is that rather than earn cashback, you earn points which can be exchanged for lottery tickets.

As with a normal cashback website, a number of retailers have partnered with freenationallotterytickets.co.uk. If you sign up for their services or purchase something from them, having gone to their site via the special links on freenationallotterytickets.co.uk, then your spend will be tracked. The only difference is that your reward is points rather than pounds.

How many points do I need?

You have four lottery ticket options when you want to redeem your points.

The purple lottery ticket

To sign up for a purple lottery ticket will cost you just 10 points. In this case, you will be in a syndicated ticket with up to 100 other members of the site.

The blue lottery ticket

With a blue lottery ticket, you’ll be syndicated with up to 50 other members. This will cost you 20 points.

The yellow lottery ticket

A yellow lottery ticket will cost you 100 points, and you will be syndicated with 10 other members.

The red lottery ticket

Red lottery tickets are not syndicated with other members. However, they will set you back 1,000 points.

Earning points

Of course, you can’t really judge what any of that means without seeing how many points you earn for the various deals. Here are ten deals available on freenationallotterytickets.co.uk. For the sake of reference, I’ve included the cashback you could earn for the same deal on Quidco and TopCashback.

Deal	Freenationallotterytickets	Quidco	Topcashback
Sun Bingo (open an account with £10 and play real money game)	12,000 points	£10	£10.10
Graze (free trial)	400 points	£1	£1.01
Virgin Media (sign up for any package)	32,000 points	£61.75	£62.36
Waterstones	20 points for every £1 spent	8%	7.07%
Tesco (first grocery order online)	2,000 points	£5	£5.05
Comet	8 points for every £1 spent	2.5%	2.52%
Mothercare	16 points for every £1 spent	5%	5.05%
Got Gold Get Cash (must return GoldPak within 90 days with at least 10 grams of gold inside)	12,000 points	£35	£35.35
lovefilm	4,000 points	£15	£7.57
Scottish Friendly Child Bond	40,000 points	£75	£50.50

It’s fair to say that freenationallotterytickets.co.uk has a fairly mixed performance here. If you used it to open a Sun Bingo account, you’d have enough points at your disposal to buy 12 tickets for you and you alone, compared to ten tickets from the return of each of the traditional cashback websites like Quidco or Topcashback.

In contrast, if you sent off gold to Got Gold Get Cash via one of the traditonal cashback sites, you’d be able to buy 35 lottery tickets with your return, compared to 12 with the lottery site.

Truly free tickets

Of course, all of this still relies on you actually spending a bit of cash in the first place. The cashback or free lottery tickets are just a welcome bonus.

However, there are ways to get genuinely free lottery tickets via the site. For starters, just signing up to the site will see you receive free tickets for the next four draws – you’ll receive the equivalent of blue tickets for the next two Lotto draws, and purple tickets for the next two Euromillion draws.

And then there are free offers which won’t cost you a penny in order for you to get some points, like signing up to fill out surveys. Yes, it will take a little time, but if it means you end up with a winning ticket, it will be worth it!

Is it worth it?

Personally, I’ll be registering just for the free tickets, and perhaps fill out a survey or two now and again if I have a spare hour. But I already use Quidco, and quite like having the option of spending my cashback however I like. In fairness to freenationallotterytickets.co.uk, once you get to 25,000 points you do have the option of cashing them in for £25 in cash, but that’s still a little cumbersome for me.

So what do you think? Is this a nice alternative to traditional cashback sites, or just a clever marketing gimmick?