---
title: "Win with NEW GEN"
description: "A consumer prize-draw platform for the HELL NEW GEN range: one system, several markets, and a photo upload that works on a phone."
url: https://milcomp.hu/en/projects/winwithnewgen/
locale: en
published: 2026-08-05
modified: 2026-08-10
author: Márton Molnár
---

Projects

# Win with NEW GEN

A consumer prize-draw platform for the HELL NEW GEN range: one system, several markets, and a photo upload that works on a phone.

Written by Márton Molnár

Founder and developer at Milcomp.

5 August 2026

## About the project

A prize draw is a strange genre, and if your company has run one, you know exactly why: it lives for a few months, but while it runs it's the most critical system the company has. If submissions break on day one of the campaign, that is not a bug ticket, that is a press story.

Win with NEW GEN is the promotional platform for HELL Energy's NEW GEN range. We built it and we run it; the Hungarian site has been live since June 2026. HELL is a client we work with across brands: we run the [HELL ICE COFFEE site](https://milcomp.hu/en/projects/hell-ice-coffee/) in 14 language variants and [FloeWater](https://milcomp.hu/en/projects/floewater/) in 5 languages.

### What is actually hard about a prize draw

At first glance nothing: a form, you type in your details, done. Up close, three things turn out to be hard.

The first is peak load. A promotion does not run evenly: when the campaign opens and before each draw, thousands of people submit at the same time.

The second is the law. The game rules are a binding document, and the dates in them are not a developer's decision. The system therefore knows 3 states: a teaser before the start, the full site during, and a closing page afterwards.

The third is that a submission includes a **photograph** of the ring pull. So the system has to reliably accept large images from phones, taken by people standing in a shop or sitting on a sofa.

### One codebase, several countries

The usual answer is to build a separate site per country. That means a separate codebase per market, multiplied maintenance and versions that are guaranteed to drift apart: a bug gets fixed on one market and stays in the others until somebody remembers to repeat the fix by hand. After the very first one, the two markets are no longer running the same site.

There is no off-the-shelf product for a promotion either, because the rules differ with every campaign, which is the kind of problem our [custom software work](https://milcomp.hu/en/services/) exists for. So we did it differently. There is one system, with a separate deployment and separate data per country, and country behaviour is configuration: timezone, phone format, currency, address format, who gets notified. Launching another market is therefore not a development project.

### The photo upload, which was the real work

Most of what this project taught us came from the fact that people upload from a phone.

A phone photo is large. The connection is not always good. Devices save in different formats. And most importantly: if the upload stalls, the user does not file a bug, they give up and never try again.

So the image is prepared in the browser before it sets off: it is smaller, it uploads faster, and it does not fail on a weak mobile connection. I insisted we test on real devices rather than in an emulator, because this is exactly the class of problem an emulator never reproduces.

### If you are planning a campaign

On a prize draw, software-side protection is never enough on its own. The system's job is not to decide who won; it is to make sure **every piece of evidence behind that decision is complete and available**: the submission, the photograph and the timestamp. The prize itself is then confirmed by a person, against the physical evidence. That separation is what makes a promotion defensible, legally and commercially.

The other lesson is about mobile. If most of your users arrive on a phone, the mobile experience is not a detail, it is the project. The half-second you save on an upload is worth more submissions than any visual flourish.

Planning something similar?

Tell us what you need and we will tell you how much work it is, how long it takes and what it costs. Including when we think it is not worth building.

Let's talk about it