How the Gift Wheel Works: Weights, Daily Limits and Blank Slices

A gift wheel is the easiest thing to get wrong in a cafe. Set it up carelessly and you either give away a free breakfast every twenty minutes, or nobody wins and the table shrugs. The Kafedeyim gift wheel is built around three dials — weight, daily limit and blank slices — and once you understand what each one does, a cafe prize wheel stops being a gamble on your own margin. (Not the party game Decision Wheel — this one hands out real prizes.)

Weight: relative odds, not percentages

Every reward you add gets a weight between 1 and 1000. This is not a percentage. It's a relative ticket count in a hat.

Say you add exactly two rewards:

• Filter coffee — weight 100
• Free breakfast — weight 1

Total weight is 101. The filter coffee wins 100 times out of 101 spins; the breakfast wins once out of 101. At the table, that means the breakfast is a rumour — real, occasionally handed over, mostly a reason for someone to say "wait, the breakfast is actually on there?"

Add a third reward and every number shifts, because weights are always read against the total. A weight of 100 doesn't mean 100%; it means "a hundred tickets out of however many are in the hat right now."

So don't tune rewards in isolation: add up your weights, then read each one as a fraction of the total.

Daily limit: your hard ceiling

Weight controls the odds. The daily limit controls the damage.

Each reward takes a daily limit from 0 to 100,000, where 0 means unlimited. It's counted per reward and resets at UTC midnight. When a reward hits its limit, it drops out of the draw entirely — the remaining rewards simply share the wheel for the rest of the day. If every reward is capped out, the wheel shows a sold-out state.

This is what makes a customer reward wheel budgetable. Your free breakfast can sit on the wheel with a weight of 1 and a daily limit of 1: even on an impossibly lucky day, you give away exactly one. Worst case is a number you chose, not a number the randomness chose for you.

Blank slices: not every spin wins

A blank slice is a reward marked as a no-win. It takes a weight like any other slice and it can win the draw — it just produces no coupon.

Blanks are the pressure valve. Without them, a wheel is a vending machine and guests treat it like one. With a decent blank weight, spinning is a small moment of suspense instead of a transaction, and your giveaway cost drops without touching a single prize.

Who does the picking

The draw is a weighted random pick made on the server, using crypto-grade randomness. The spinning animation on the phone is theatre; the result was decided before the wheel slowed down.

A win produces a 6-character coupon code from a no-confusables alphabet — no 0, 1, I or O, so nothing gets misread at the register. The code is valid for exactly 5 minutes, with a live countdown on the guest's screen. That's deliberate: it's a "walk to the register now" window, not a coupon that dies in someone's pocket. Your staff checks it on the cashier page and gets one of four verdicts — valid, already used, expired, or not found. Each code redeems once.

The one-spin limit, honestly

One spin per device, per venue, per day, enforced with a cookie plus localStorage.

Be clear-eyed about this: it's a UX-level limit, not an unbeatable one. A determined guest who clears their cookies can spin again. We're not going to pretend otherwise. The thing that actually caps your spend is the per-reward daily limit — that's server-side and it doesn't care how many times someone clears anything.

A starter wheel you can copy

If you want something safe on day one, try this shape:

• Blank slice — weight 400, no limit
• Filter coffee — weight 100, daily limit 10
• 10% off the bill — weight 60, daily limit 20
• Free cookie with any drink — weight 40, daily limit 15
• Free breakfast for two — weight 1, daily limit 1

Total weight: 601. So roughly two thirds of spins land on the blank, the coffee comes up about one spin in six, and the breakfast is a once-in-a-few-hundred-spins story that costs you at most one breakfast a day. Run it a week, look at your issued-versus-redeemed numbers in the Wheel tab, and move the weights around.

Free to build, Pro to spin

You can configure the whole wheel — rewards, weights, limits, blanks — on the free plan. It only spins for guests on Pro. That's the honest split, and it's the same for campaign banners.

If you'd rather see one running before you build your own, our demo venue is a real, fully-populated example with a live wheel on it.

When you're ready, registration is free and takes an email and a venue name — no password, no card. Build the whole wheel on the free plan, hold the weights up against your own margins, and go Pro when you actually want guests spinning it. That's the right order.