Secret Santa Generator

How to organize a Secret Santa draw

1. Optionally give the exchange a name in Event name (optional); it appears on every reveal link and card.
2. List everyone in Participants (one per line). You need at least 3 people. Names must be different: if the same name appears twice (in any capitalization), the copy is ignored and you are told.
3. Open Exclusions (optional) to add rules, one per line: - Alice, Ben means Alice and Ben can’t draw each other. Put a whole family on one line (Alice, Ben, Chloe) and nobody in it draws another member. - Alice > Chloe means Alice can’t draw Chloe, but Chloe may still draw Alice. Use it to avoid repeating last year’s pairs.
4. Tick Avoid two people drawing each other if you don’t want “swaps” where two people give to each other.
5. Add a budget, date or theme in Budget or note for everyone (optional). It is shown to each person with their result.
6. Press Draw names.

The participant list, exclusions and options are saved in this browser, so you can come back and draw again.

Sharing the results privately

After the draw, the pairs stay hidden: the organizer can take part without seeing who has whom. Tick Show who gives to whom (organizer only) only if you really need to check.

• Private reveal links: each participant gets their own link. Use Copy link on their row and send it by text, chat or email, or Copy all links to get the whole list at once. When they open it, they see “Hi Ben!” and a Reveal my person button, then the name of the person they give a gift to, plus your note.
• Printed cards: Print folded cards prints one card per person, two per row. Cut them out, fold along the middle so the name stays inside, and hand out each card to the person named on the outside. Thick paper, or folding twice, stops the name from showing through. The print preview shows the names, so an organizer who is also playing should look away or let someone else print.
• Copy the full list copies every “giver → receiver” line, for an organizer who is not taking part.

How private are the links?

Honestly: they are obfuscated, not encrypted. The result is stored in the part of the link after the “#”, which browsers never send to a server, so nothing about your draw is stored online. The name inside is scrambled so it can’t be read at a glance, but someone who knows how the tool works could decode a link, including someone else’s if they get hold of it. That is fine for a friendly gift exchange; just send each link only to its owner. A small checksum detects links that were cut or edited.

How the draw works

Each participant gives exactly one gift and receives exactly one, and nobody draws their own name. The tool shuffles the list with your browser’s cryptographic random generator (Web Crypto) and keeps the first arrangement that respects every exclusion. With normal exclusions, this means every valid draw is equally likely. When the exclusions are very tight, it switches to a randomized search that still finds a valid draw if one exists.

If the rules make a draw impossible, for example when someone is excluded from everyone, the tool says so and names the person when it can, instead of producing a broken result.