Draw Secret Santa names without anybody signing up

Type everyone in, press the button, and each person gets a link of their own that shows one name and nothing else. No account, no email addresses to collect, and no hat.

What happens when you press draw

The draw runs on the server the moment you submit the form, and it is written down once. You get a page with one private link per person — that is the whole result. Send each person theirs however you already talk to them: the group chat, a message, out loud with a phone in your hand.

Opening a link shows that person the name they drew and, if the group has added wishlists, what that person has asked for. It shows them nothing about anybody else. There is no password on it, because the link is the secret; treat it the way you would treat a folded slip of paper.

• No account. Not for you, not for the group. Nobody types an email address anywhere.
• One draw, once. It cannot be re-run. A draw you can reshuffle is one somebody can watch change.
• Nothing is emailed. This site sends no email at all, which is why the links are yours to hand out.

Keep your own link — the organiser page — somewhere you can find it again. It is the only way back to the list of links, and there is no account to recover it from.

The three rules it enforces

Most generators only guarantee the first of these. The other two are the ones that quietly ruin an exchange, and both are checked before the draw is written.

If a group cannot be drawn under those rules — usually because one household is more than half of it — you are told which household is the problem rather than being asked to try again.

Setting a budget people actually stick to

The budget is the single thing most worth agreeing before you draw, and it belongs in writing rather than in somebody’s memory of the group chat. Whatever you type goes on every participant’s page, so the person buying sees it at the moment they are deciding.

Handing the links out

Send each link privately — one message to one person. The one mistake worth avoiding is pasting the whole organiser page into the group chat, because that page holds everybody’s link.

The organiser screen shows you who has opened theirs, so you can chase the two people who have not without asking the group twice.

• Message each person their own link directly, not in the group.
• If somebody loses theirs, send it again from the organiser page — it is the same link, and opening it twice is fine.
• If somebody has to drop out, start a new draw. Swapping one person in after the fact would need a reshuffle in front of people who already know their name.

What you, as the organiser, can and cannot see

Worth being straight about, because most tools are vague here. Your page never shows a pairing — not anybody else’s, and not your own. You draw your own name by opening your own link, the same as everybody else.

What you do hold is every link, because handing them out is the job and this site sends no email. So the honest statement is this: peeking is possible, but it takes a deliberate act — opening somebody else’s link — rather than a glance at your own screen. If you would rather not be able to, ask somebody outside the group to run the draw.

Adding wishlists, if the group wants them

Each person’s page has a box where they can write down a few things they would like, in budget. Their Santa sees it; nobody else does, and the person who wrote it never finds out which one was chosen.

This is the part that turns a draw into a present somebody actually wanted, and it is why the guessing usually stops after the first year a group does it this way.

Variants that still work with a draw

The rules above are the common ones. Most of the variants people run are a change to what you buy, not to how names come out of the hat, so the draw handles them unchanged — just say which one you are playing when you send the links.

• Themed. Books only, something handmade, something from a local shop. Put the theme in the group name so it travels with every link.
• Junk exchange. Something you already own and will not miss. Set the budget to zero and say so.
• Two rounds. Run the generator twice with the same names. The second draw is independent, so some pairs may repeat.
• Children included. Add them by name like anybody else and put the family surname in the household column so siblings do not draw each other.