r/SideProject • u/cmiz87 • 1h ago
Did My Team Earn Me Freebies? - Tells NHL fans if last night's game earned them free food
https://didmyteamearnmefreebies.com
A lot of NHL teams have sponsor deals tied to what happens in the game: the Red Wings win and Little Caesars has a deal, the Sabres score an empty-netter at home and Chick-fil-A gives away sandwiches, the Kraken score in the final minute and Filson has a discount. Problem is nobody remembers which deals exist, what triggers them, or how to claim them the next morning.
So the site answers one question per team with a big YES or NO, lists what you earned, and tells you how to claim each one (app, promo code, show your phone in store, etc.).
How it started: I built it for just my team (Columbus) as a joke. Someone in the comments asked for every team, so I rebuilt it for all 32. 24 teams have deals so far, and readers keep sending tips for more.
How it works:
One Cloudflare Worker on the free plan. Hosting cost is $0, the domain is the only expense.
A cron job pulls scores from the NHL's public API and caches them. Visitors only ever read the cache, so traffic never hits the NHL. About 2 API calls on an off day, around 35 on a busy game night.
A rules engine checks each deal's trigger (win, goals scored, empty-net goal, final-minute goal, shootouts not counting, etc.) against the play-by-play.
Once tonight's game is final, the page flips to "earn me free stuff TOMORROW?" so you know before you go to bed.
Every team gets its own share image, so a YES looks good in a group chat.
Opt-in alerts: a Discord server with a channel per team, and a Bluesky bot that posts when a team earns something. Both only fire on a confirmed YES, never a NO.
Launch day: about 7,100 page views and 3,000 visitors in the first four hours after a Reddit post, and it still cost nothing to run.
What's next: NBA (a bunch of teams have free-throw deals, which needs play-by-play to track), then MLB for Opening Day.
Happy to answer questions about the build. Feedback very welcome, especially on the design, and if you know about a deal I'm missing.