Who makes this
Lucky Dip is built and maintained by Mark Fensom, a solo developer based in the UK. There's no company behind it, no team and no investor — it's a personal project that got enough polish to be worth putting a domain on.
If something's broken, wrong or annoying, it lands on my desk. You can reach me directly at hello@luckydip.me, and there's more on the contact page.
Why it exists
Picking lottery numbers by hand is oddly hard. You end up with the same birthdays every week, or you stare at the grid and choose something that feels random but really isn't — humans are famously bad at that. The shop counter's lucky dip solves it in a second, but you don't get to see it happen, and you can't do it at home for the fun of it.
So I built the version I wanted: one button, an honest shuffle underneath, and the numbers appearing with enough of a flourish to be enjoyable. It costs nothing, works on a phone, and doesn't ask who you are.
How it's built
Deliberately simple, and deliberately not a single Math.random() call. Every dip runs three stages in sequence:
- An SFC32 pseudorandom generator, seeded fresh on every dip from the clock, a high-resolution timer and the browser's own crypto entropy, hashed together with cyrb128.
- A φ-weighted distribution that biases the candidate pool along an exponential curve — where the strength of the bias is itself drawn at random each run, so the tilt is never the same twice.
- A Fisher–Yates shuffle with entropy injection, where each swap target is drawn from those weights with fresh jitter mixed in, breaking up the clustering a plain shuffle sometimes leaves behind.
There's a fuller write-up on the homepage. The whole thing is plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript — no frameworks, no build step. It installs as a web app and works completely offline, because once the page has loaded there's nothing left to ask a server for.
To be straight about it: this is high-quality pseudo-randomness built for everyday fun. It is not certified gaming equipment, and not suitable for cryptographic use.
What it won't do
Lucky Dip will not improve your chances of winning, and I'd rather say that plainly than bury it in the small print. In a fair draw every combination is exactly as likely as every other, so no generator, system or pattern can shift the odds. What a generator can do is save you the bother of choosing, and steer you away from the heavily clustered lines thousands of other people also pick — which doesn't help you win, but does mean sharing with fewer people if you do.
If you want the actual maths, I've written it up in how lottery odds are calculated and do lucky numbers work?.
Keeping the guides accurate
The game guides on this site carry ticket prices, draw times, prize tiers and odds, and those change — Mega Millions overhauled its whole format in April 2025, and Powerball only became available to UK players in July 2026. Every guide shows the date I last checked it against the operator's official site. If you spot something out of date, tell me and I'll fix it.
Always confirm the details with the official operator before you play. I'm not affiliated with Allwyn, The National Lottery, the Multi-State Lottery Association, Mega Millions or any other operator.
Privacy, in one paragraph
The generator runs entirely in your browser. There's no account, no database of your numbers, and nothing you generate is ever sent anywhere. Preferences like your theme and recent dips live in your browser's local storage and nowhere else. Visitors are counted with Plausible, which is cookieless. Full detail is on the privacy page.
How it pays for itself
Hosting, the domain and the SSL certificate cost real money, so the site carries advertising through Google AdSense, and there's a Ko-fi page if you'd like to chip in towards a coffee. That's the whole business model. I don't sell data, because I don't collect any worth selling.
Gambling responsibly
This site is for entertainment, and it's for over-18s. If the fun has stopped, or you're spending more than you meant to, the responsible gambling page lists free, confidential UK support — worth a look before it feels urgent rather than after.
One tap, five balls, no signup.