Secret Santa
Draw names, each person gets a private link.
Free to use · No sign-up needed
Your two links appear here once the draw is set up: one for everybody who is in, and one for you.
Draw names without anybody having to hold the hat
The hat works fine when everybody is in one room. It stops working the moment two people are at home, one is on holiday, and somebody has to be trusted to draw on their behalf and then forget what they saw. The usual replacement is one person with a spreadsheet, who now knows the entire draw and has to spend December pretending they do not.
So this asks for an occasion and gives you a link. Everybody who opens it puts their name in and is handed a private link of their own. When everyone is in, you press the button, and each person's link starts showing one name: theirs to buy for. Nobody sees anybody else's, and neither do you.
How to run one
- Say what it is for, and set a budget if there is one. Both are optional except the name.
- Send the joining link to everyone who is in.
- Watch the names arrive on your own page. Take off anybody who joined by mistake.
- Add any pairs who should not draw each other.
- Press Draw. Tell everybody to open the private link they were given.
Three things worth knowing before you press it
You will not be able to see the result. There is no organiser's view of the draw, here or anywhere, and that is the whole point of running it this way rather than with a spreadsheet. If you want to know who you have, put your own name in and open your own private link like everybody else.
The private link is the only copy. We keep a scrambled version of it, which means we cannot read it back and cannot send anybody another one. The page each person joins from remembers theirs, so coming back to the joining link on the same phone hands it over again — but a new phone, a cleared browser or a lost message means they have lost it. Tell people to save it when they get it.
Starting over is real but it is not a time machine. You can clear the draw and run it again: everybody keeps their private link and it shows their new person. What it cannot do is un-tell anybody who already looked.
Good uses
- An office Secret Santa where half the team is remote.
- A family spread across three houses who want one present each, not eleven.
- A group of friends doing a book swap, a plant swap or a bad-mug exchange.
- Anything where the fun is that nobody knows until the day.
When to use something else
A draw hands out names; it does not collect money and it does not decide anything. For chipping in on one big present that is Gift Pledges, for picking between options somebody has already written down that is Live Poll, and for everybody signing one thing for one person that is Group Card.
Questions people ask
- Does anyone need an account?
- No. You set the draw up, you send one link, people put their names in. Nobody has to sign up, nobody has to give an email address, and nobody installs anything. The organiser can sign in if they want to keep it past ninety days and find it again without the link — that is the only thing an account does here, it is optional, and it changes nothing for anybody else. It works in whatever browser is already open, on a phone as well as a laptop.
- Can I see who drew who?
- No, and that is on purpose rather than a feature we ran out of time for. Each person's result is locked to their own private link, and there is no page anywhere — yours included — that lists them. Nobody at Gleekit can read them either. The trade is that if somebody loses their link there is nothing we can look up for them: you take them out of the draw, they join again, and you start the draw over.
- How secret is it, really?
- Here is the honest version. Who drew whom is kept in a place our own website cannot read — the only way to it is one person's private link, which is checked inside the database and gives back exactly one name. So a curious colleague poking at the page, or reading what it loads, finds nothing: not a list, not their own with somebody else's beside it, nothing. What is public to anyone who has the six-character link is everything on the page itself — the occasion, the budget, the date, everybody's name, and the fact that you have drawn. That is the same openness that makes every live tool here work without accounts, and it is worth knowing rather than being surprised by. And the arithmetic is still the arithmetic: two people in a draw have drawn each other, and no amount of care about where things are stored changes that.
- What if two people shouldn't draw each other?
- Add them as a pair on your own page before you draw, and the draw will keep them apart in both directions. Couples, people who share a desk, whoever bought for whom last year. If you set so many pairs that no valid draw exists at all — two people who exclude each other, say — you are told so straight away rather than left watching a spinner, and you can take one off and try again.
- Somebody joined late, or somebody dropped out. Now what?
- Before you draw, either is easy: they join from the link, or you take them off your own page. After you have drawn, adding somebody means starting over, because there is nobody for a late arrival to buy for and nobody buying for them. If you take somebody out after the draw, the person who had them sees a note saying so and comes to find you — put them back, or start over.
- How long does it last?
- Ninety days after the last time anybody used it, then it is deleted along with every name and every result, and all the links stop working — yours, the joining link and every private link. Anything happening in the draw pushes that date out again. There is no archive and no way to bring one back once it has gone, so if somebody wants to remember who they had, tell them to screenshot their page. Signing in from your manage link keeps the draw from expiring at all, which is worth doing for one you run every December.