EconTeen – Financial literacy lessons and tools for teens
32 comments
·August 4, 2025hirvi74
How well can one learn financial literacy and how to manage money when one lacks financial assets and money of any significant amount?
I am not questioning that one can learn enough to pass the lessons, but often times, lessons fail to prepare for the real world.
I personally consider myself to be quite keen in the areas of financial literacy compared to most people. To be honest, I owe most of what I learned to two things:
1. Being addicted to Runescape in my youth back in the early 2000s. I am dead serious too. For a boring grindy point-and-click adventure, the game really had a lot of real world lessons packed in to it -- predominately to much of the game's economy depending on interactions with other players at the time.
2. Some unpleasant experiences growing up, but I do not feel like those had as much as an impact as #1, oddly enough.
One important point about the game is that I had stake in the game, so to speak. I put a lot of (wasted) time and (wasted) effort into the game in order to earn more and more fake, virtual currency. However, that in-game currency, at the time, had a lot of value to me. Every decision I made with the in-game currency had to be calculated and tact. "How do I earn enough for <x>?" If I spend <y>, I can afford <z>, but won't have enough for <a>" And so on.
I feel like in a lesson on a platform like EconTeen might lack that "stake" or "value" that MMORPG resources or real world money has. I am not trying to say EconTeen is a subpar product or anything like that. I am just thinking about myself, once a teenager, and I know I would have learned just enough to make it through these lessons as fast possible so that I may return to my video game as fast as possible.
reactordev
Robux, this needs to be in robux…
You’re right. It wasn’t until I had any kind of real money that I had to actually learn financial literacy. I learned it as a kid but had completely forgotten because I grew up poor.
coderoller
Another subscription...
With so many subscriptions for everything these days, I'm turning back to good old books to educate the kids. You pay once, they don't disappear after reading unlike in Fallout games, so you can reuse them with all the kids :). Helping them enjoy reading early really makes a lasting difference!
_def
Knee jerk reaction: teens that need this won't have the money to pay for it
apsurd
Education tends toward public good will if the mission is to educate and improve learning outcomes.
I've been told there's tons of money in education! But the insight is the edtech stuff that makes money does not sell education. B2b up-skilling platforms for example sell the promise of higher earnings. Food safety, HR training sell compliance. College prep sells college acceptance, and so on.
The people with the foresight to pay for financial literacy will very likely already be financially literate.
I'm conflicted.
eru
What does college sell?
Btw, there's also money in actual learning things, look at eg music classes adults take just for their own sake.
(Of course, you could say that a guitar teacher is selling 'getting laid'. But that's perhaps going a bit too far.)
apsurd
I do agree there's money in discretionary learning. Music, dance, knitting, sports, you name it. In the scheme of things it seems niche. I don't intend to diminish the value of humans learning things.
My call out is when we think about changing outcomes for underserved groups of people, there's a hard reckoning that comes.
For example I dabbled in "teaching people to cook". It's one of the most transformative skills. After some months my takeaway is that people that pay for learning to cook aren't paying "to learn", they already know or want to get better or quite bluntly pay for food-porn, edutainment. There's thousands of published cook books of all forms. The barrier isn't lack of materials/content.
A person goes from zero to 1 learning to cook due to necessity, not my online saas course. Btw saas can work, people make a killing; but they're paying for network and "influencer" access, not cooking content.
apsurd
Gateway/access to professional-tier job market.
This is what they sell, but it's outdated since the 50s and millennials+ have slowly realized it was largely false promises. (both sides are to blame just to be clear)
conception
My knee-jerk reaction was “look at all those emojis. Claude made this in 30 minutes.”
Right or wrong, that’s the aesthetic now.
snvzz
First lesson: Avoid recurring payments aka subscriptions.
Chrisjackson4
We just launched the second version of EconTeen, a financial literacy platform built to teach middle and high schoolers how money actually works.
Most kids don’t get any financial education we’re trying to fix that.
22+ self-paced lessons 25+ real-world tools (budgeting, investing, taxes, careers, etc.)
Our first launch reached 2,500+ students, and we’re now gearing up for back-to-school outreach with teachers and schools.
https://www.producthunt.com/products/econteen?launch=econtee...
I’d love any feedback, harsh or helpful. Thanks!
– Christopher
SoftTalker
> Most kids don’t get any financial education
We got some, in home economics. Not sure that subject is really offered anymore?
That was mostly around budgeting. What we didn't get nearly enough of was time value of money, and the cost of credit/borrowing.
As a result a lot of people buy a car and it's just a payment. They have no idea what they are paying as a total price. They don't start a 401K because they have no concept how much difference compounding makes if you start saving when you are 22 vs. 50. Then they are upset when companies do stuff "to benefit stockholders" and never consider that they could have been a stockholder.
anigbrowl
[delayed]
harmmonica
I tried to find a freemium option that didn't require me signing up or agreeing to spend $3.99 at some later date. Could be helpful to get more people deeper into the "funnel." Like maybe open up the first 1/x of one of the 22 lessons?
If that option is there I couldn't find it so consider that a single-user usability test or just user error.
varenc
This is a great use for privacy.com generated credit cards! Basically, you create a unique credit card number but set its budget to $1. They won't be able to start charging you until you raise the limit on the card. That's how I think all trials should work: requiring an additional confirmation to start charging you.
Also pretty ironic that this site is designed to trick you into paying for a subscription you've forgotten about...but that's the entire subscription/free trial economy of course.
jncfhnb
there is some great irony on the concept of putting in a debt driven option here
dsiegel2275
Curious if your platform supports LTI 1.3 for easy integration with school LMSes?
mrangle
It seems like an interesting idea.
I'd be intrigued, but would quickly click away.
You're forgoing the part of the sales cycle where you demonstrate what you are offering. It goes from telling me, briefly, to asking for a credit card.
I rarely to never give a credit card in exchange for a free trial. Not without some type of proof of concept, first.
It's like being asked for a credit card by someone who approaches me on the street and asks me to trust them.
Absent widespread recommendations, If I don't have a better idea of what I'm buying then I won't buy it.
mushufasa
there was a company "Zogo" that built a phone app to do this and sold it to banks as a free perk to try to increase savings rates / utilization of financial products at the bank. Had some moderate success. Haven't heard about it recently.
theogravity
Really love the idea! I tried going to the FAQ on mobile safari on iOS and can't scroll on the answer sections, so the text is cut off.
DoctorWhoof
Couldn't find anywhere (looked in F.A.Q. first) which age group this is most appropriate for. "Teens" is kinda vague!
Some clear requirement like "5th grade math" would be more appropriate.
poly2it
They list a high school freshman in their reviews.
m-hodges
Is this about Finance or Economics?
more_corn
First financial lesson for teens. Control your subscription expenditures.
Just a comment for institutional subscriptions: if you haven't found out already, you'll probably want to hire some sales people who have the ability to check boxes and get through district red tape. If you're doing it, make sure you keep the single classroom subscription price beneath the threshold of "reimbursible with a receipt" instead of "must go through the business office". The latter can really end up being very involved. (You'll still find reluctance to spend that way, but at least it makes trials viable.)
Source: gave up on the process. It seemed the larger the bureaucracy, the lower the conversion rate.