Draw Secret Santa names without an account
Type the names, keep couples apart, and draw. Print a folded slip for each person or pass the phone round. Nothing you enter leaves your browser.
Free tools › Free Secret Santa generator
Quick answer
Enter everyone's names, add a don't-pair rule for any couple who already buy for each other, and draw. Then either print the folded slips and hand them out, or pass the phone round so each person taps their own name and sees only their own recipient.
No account, no email addresses, and nothing typed here reaches a server. The draw runs in your browser, and you hand it out one of two ways: on paper, or by passing the phone round the room.
For couples, or anyone who already buys for each other. Neither can draw the other. Rules narrow the field, so a lot of them in a small group can leave no legal draw at all — you will be told if so.
The link carries the names, the rules and the budget so you can come back to them — never the draw. It goes after the “#”, which is never sent to us, and the pairings are not in it at all: they exist only in this tab, and drawing again replaces them.
Folded slips, or pass the phone
Both come from the same draw, and which one you want depends on whether everybody is in the room.
**Folded slips** are the right default. You get one slip per person, laid out two to a row with a cut line and a fold line: the outside says whose slip it is, the inside says who they are buying for, and the budget is printed on every one so nobody has to remember it. Print, cut, fold, hand out. Once the sheet is out of the printer it needs no trust in this page at all, and it works for the cousins who are only turning up on the day.
**Pass the phone** suits a group already sitting together. Each person taps their own name, sees one screen with their person on it, and taps to hide it. That name is then crossed off and cannot be opened again — which is the point. A list you can reopen, on an unlocked phone going round a table, is not a secret; it is a leaderboard. The trade is real: if somebody taps and then genuinely does not look, there is no second chance, and the fix is to print the slips and start over.
Don't-pair rules, and why they sometimes jam
A don't-pair rule keeps two people from drawing each other, in both directions. Use it for couples, or for anyone who already buys a gift for the other and does not need a second one.
Rules narrow the field, and a field narrowed far enough has no legal answer left. Three people have only two possible draws; five people with two couples in them can be impossible. When that happens this page says so and names whoever the rules left with nobody to buy for, rather than quietly handing you a draw that breaks one of your own rules. The answer is almost always to remove a rule rather than to add a person.
There is a sharper version of the same problem that no amount of rules can fix: the rules are not secret. You are going to say them out loud, so in a small group a draw can be deducible from the rules alone even when it is perfectly legal. Two rules over four people are enough. If the group is small, use fewer rules and accept that the couple might draw each other.
What a draw in your browser cannot do
It cannot keep the secret from you.
Everything here happens on the device in front of you, which is the reason nothing is sent anywhere and also the limit of what it can promise: the pairings are on your screen, in your tab's memory, and printed on your sheet of paper. If you are running the exchange and not taking part, that is completely fine — it is how the hat has always worked. If you are taking part, you have just spent December knowing everybody's answer including your own, and you are the only person at the table who cannot enjoy the reveal.
The other thing it cannot do is remember. There is no account, so there is nothing keeping the draw: close the tab and it is gone. The share link carries the names, the rules and the budget so you can come back to the setup, and deliberately does not carry the pairings — a link that contained them would be a link that leaked them, and anyone you sent it to could read the lot. So finish the hand-out before you leave the page.
When you want the draw off your laptop
The Secret Santa app is the same idea with the one weakness taken out. The draw is computed on the server and stored where no participant can read it, the organizer included: the response carries no pairing data, so it never exists in any browser at all. Each person sees exactly one name, their own, alongside that person's gift hint. Givers keep private gift-idea notes that not even the household's adults can read, because a note names the recipient. And when the presents are open, the organizer triggers a reveal and everyone sees the authoritative who-had-whom list at once.
It also solves the part this page does not touch at all: what to actually buy. Each person keeps a wish list in the Wish List app — items with priorities and links, visible to everyone or to adults only — and a giver hops straight to the list of the person they drew. A slip of paper tells you a name. It cannot tell you that they already own the book.
That is worth having when the person setting it up is also in the draw, when the group is big enough that somebody will join late, or when you want the hints and the budget to still be there in three weeks. For twelve people around one table tonight, print the slips.
Apps that do this continuously
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