Secret Santa generator

A gift exchange where everyone’s name goes into a hat and each person secretly draws someone to buy one gift for, usually within a set budget. On exchange day the gifts are handed out, and the fun is guessing who your Santa was.

This page never shows the matches — there is no “show all” view, and the organizer’s screen only lists one link per person. Each link carries just that person’s match, encrypted with its own random key that lives in the link’s #fragment (the part browsers never send to any server). Be aware that a link is still a link: anyone who opens it, organizer included, sees that one match — same as any link-based generator. If you organize and play, just don’t open other people’s links.

No. There is no server and no account: names, the draw and the links are created in your browser. The organizer’s draft and links are saved only in that browser’s local storage so they can come back and resend a link. We count anonymous page visits, nothing else.

Tap two names to make a pair; the pair can’t draw each other in either direction. Use it for couples, people who live together or teammates who already swap gifts. Nobody ever draws themselves.

With too many exclusions there may be no valid draw — for example, 3 people where two are a couple. The generator checks this before drawing and tells you exactly which people are stuck, so you know which pair to remove.

Open this page again on the same device: the links are still there to copy or share again. Adding or removing someone needs a re-draw, which creates new links for everyone; the reveal page shows a draw code so people can tell the new links from the old ones.

Yes. It uses your browser’s cryptographic random number generator (crypto.getRandomValues) and picks uniformly among all valid assignments whenever the exclusions allow, so every allowed outcome is equally likely.

Between 3 and 100 per draw. For a bigger group, split into teams and run one draw per team.

Offices usually pick $20–$30, friends $25–$50, families anywhere from $20 to $100. Pick a number everyone can afford and write it in — it shows up on every link with gift ideas under that amount.