Lootlock protects youngsters from overspending on gaming and can be presenting at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025

Nick Pompa, founding father of Lootlock — an app that forestalls youngsters from operating up unauthorized gaming payments on their mother and father’ bank cards — is an avid gamer and software program developer working in fintech. 

As a dad of two underneath two, he’s wanting ahead to sharing his ardour for gaming together with his youngsters once they develop sufficiently old to play. He began gaming at age 6, he informed TechCrunch. Lootlock was chosen for TechCrunch’s 2025 Startup Battlefield 200 and can be exhibiting at TechCrunch Disrupt, October 27 to 29 in San Francisco. 

As he gabbed about gaming with different mother and father, or just learn the information, he saved listening to horror tales of children shackling their mother and father with surprise credit card bills, typically unwittingly operating up thousands of dollars.  

The gaming trade has a notoriously slimy facet of utilizing “design tricks,” because the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau described last year. They usually goal youngsters, attractive them into unlocking fee-incurring sport options. Other businesses, just like the FTC have issued similar warnings.  

“The gaming industry uses clever design, social engineering, and player tracking to encourage kids to spend more money while playing,” Pompa mentioned. “I am an avid gamer, so I have seen firsthand the drastic shift to micro-transactions in the industry over the last eight to nine years.” 

Although the FTC did power Fortnight earlier this 12 months to refund $126 million to people who filed claims, that’s uncommon. Parents usually haven’t any recourse however to pay.  

The typical recommendation is for folks to make use of device-level parental controls that block in-app purchases. But, Pompa mentioned, a lot of his mother or father buddies are tremendous with letting youngsters spend a bit cash on such purchases, underneath the suitable circumstances.  

He informed the story of the pal named Joe that impressed Pompa to construct Lootlock. Joe is a dad to 3 youngsters, all avid players. Joe offers every child an allowance each month, and the children have been utilizing the cash to purchase gaming merchandise, establishing a ridiculous system the place he handed them allowance money and so they handed it again to pay the bank card. And he needed to monitor their purchases carefully.  

Looklock lets mother and father routinely load a digital, pay as you go bank card, issued by Lootlock’s associate, Transcard, that youngsters add to their gadget’s digital pockets.  

Parents can automate a set quantity of allowance to be added to the cardboard, say weekly or month-to-month, and may then make any portion of that not instantly out there. The child can unlock extra as they, for example, full their chores. Parents can approve will increase to the cardboard by way of a textual content message. 

“We’re giving the parents super granular controls on how their kids can spend and when their kids can spend,” Pompa mentioned. 

Lootlock is gamifying chores, too, with an upcoming function that can be out there in October referred to as “bounty boards.”  Parents arrange these boards that are primarily lists of the kid’s chores. As the children full them — cleansing their room, pet care, and so forth. — they earn a “bounty.” And once they hit no matter threshold of bounties a mother or father units, the app will unlock extra allowance to spend.  

There’s additionally a gamified monetary training element. Kids select an avatar and as they follow good spending habits, like checking their Lootlock dashboard which tells them their account balances, they earn factors that add as much as gear for his or her avatar: swords and armor, and so forth. Their avatar is persistent throughout anyplace Lootlock integrates into, like its Discord servers. 

“We’re tying all of the financial concepts into a video game concept,” Pompa mentioned. 

Lootlock balances are additionally restricted to spending solely on gaming merchandise and may’t be used for different purchases on the web. So mother and father don’t should carefully monitor what varieties of things the kid is shopping for on-line. The concept, for now, is to deal with educating youngsters accountable gaming.  

The startup at the moment employs seven folks and is totally bootstrapped.

If you need to be taught from Lootlock firsthand, and see dozens of extra pitches, invaluable workshops, and make the connections that drive enterprise outcomes, head right here to be taught extra about this 12 months’s Disrupt, held October 27 to 29 in San Francisco.