Do you need a SpinOfLuck account? What one adds, and what stays the same

SpinOfLuck was built around a simple promise: open it, type some names, spin, and get a fair winner, with no signup and nothing to install. That promise has not changed. This post is about a feature that sits entirely on top of it, for the people who asked for it, and can be ignored completely by everyone else.

The short version: you can now create an optional account. It does not gate anything, it does not cost anything, and it does not change how the wheel works. What it adds is a way to carry your wheels and your history between devices, and to hold onto the rooms and draws you host.

The default is still no account

By default, a SpinOfLuck wheel lives in the browser you made it in. Your entries, your colours and your spin history are stored locally on your own machine, and nothing is sent to a server to make the wheel spin. That is the local-first design, and it is deliberately the path of least resistance: no email, no password, no account screen between you and a spin.

The one thing local-first cannot do is follow you to another device. A wheel made on your laptop is not on your phone, because it never left the laptop. For a lot of people that is fine. For anyone who moves between a home computer, a work machine and a classroom PC, it is the one rough edge. That edge is what an account smooths.

What an account adds

Signing in unlocks a handful of genuinely useful things, and nothing you would not expect:

• Save a wheel, open it anywhere. Press Save to account in the toolbar and the wheel, with its entries, colours, winner style and winner history, opens on another device from the wheel picker's Open from account list. It is a backup, not a move: the local copy stays exactly where it was.
• Saved lists. Type a class roster or a prize pool once, save it from the wheel's Lists button, and load it into any wheel, the team generator or the pairing tool. Generated teams can be saved back as lists too.
• Folders. The dashboard files wheels and lists into folders you name, so Period 3 and Friday Giveaways stay apart.
• History that follows you. The winners you draw while signed in are recorded to your account, so your recent spins show up on any device instead of being pinned to a single browser.
• Groups. Create a group, send its invite link to friends, family or a co-teacher, and share wheels with them. Everyone in the group can load the same wheels, and a picks log shows who was chosen, on which wheel, and by whom. Groups are invite-only by design: there is no user search and no friend requests, so nobody can be found who was not handed a link.
• A display name. Pick the name other group members see, and change it whenever you like from the dashboard. Your email is never shown to them.
• Reclaim your rooms and draws. If you host a multiplayer room or publish a verifiable draw, your account remembers it, so you can reopen or reclaim it from a different device rather than losing the thread when you switch machines.

All of it lives in one place: a dashboard that shows your account, your usage, your recent spins, your synced wheels, your groups, and the rooms and draws you host. It is a home base for the people who use SpinOfLuck often enough to want one.

What syncs, and what stays on your device

Being honest about the boundary matters more than promising everything. When you back up a wheel, these travel with it:

• The wheel's name.
• Its entries, including any weights.
• Your per-name colours.
• The winner style you chose for it.
• Its folder, and its winner history (the most recent 200 wins), merged rather than overwritten when the wheel is restored on a device that has its own record.

These deliberately do not sync, and stay on the device where you made them:

• Logos and uploaded per-name images. These are large, and keeping them out of the cloud copy keeps your stored data small and quick.

Privacy, and why the default matters

An account introduces something the default never had: an email address. That is worth taking seriously, so the design keeps account data private to each user. Your synced wheels and history are readable only by your own account, not by other people and not by us in any shared pool. Groups are the one place you share on purpose, and even there other members see only your display name and what you chose to share with that group. And because the account is opt-in, the people who care most about collecting nothing simply do not make one, and nothing about their experience changes.

For classrooms this is the important part. A teacher can keep doing exactly what they did: open the wheel, spin, and let nothing leave the browser. The account is there for the teacher who wants the same set of wheels on the classroom computer and their own laptop, not something a class ever touches.

When it is worth it, and when it is not

An account is worth it if you use SpinOfLuck across more than one device, if you run giveaways or rooms you want to manage from anywhere, or if the thought of a browser reset wiping your carefully built wheels bothers you. In those cases the backup alone justifies the two minutes it takes.

It is not worth it if you spin from one device, keep your lists elsewhere anyway, or simply prefer to hand over nothing. That is a completely reasonable choice, and the product is built so it costs you nothing to make it. No account, no signup, no compromise on the actual wheel.

That is the whole idea. The account is a convenience for people who want it and an invisible non-event for people who do not. The wheel in the middle stays free, fair and yours, either way.