About SecretSanta

SecretSanta exists because the usual way to run a draw online — an account, everyone's email addresses, a database of who-buys-for-whom — is wildly more machinery than the job needs. This site does the same job with no accounts at all: the draw happens in your browser, and the results live inside links.

How the draw works

The generator looks for a derangement: an assignment where nobody draws themselves. It first tries fast random shuffles; for tightly restricted groups it falls back to a systematic search (most-constrained person first), which either finds a valid assignment or proves none exists. Keep-apart rules are hard constraints — the tool will report an impossible draw, naming who has been boxed in, rather than quietly breaking a rule.

Personal links are checked by test as well as by design: before launch, the engine was run through hundreds of draws with exclusion rules and every result machine-verified — no self-draws, no broken rules — and personal-link payloads were decoded and inspected field by field to confirm they contain one match and nothing else.

What this site is not

It isn't a gift shop, a registry or a messaging service — it makes the draw and the links, and then it gets out of the way. It can't remind your participants (there are no accounts to remind), can't recover a lost link (there's no copy to recover from), and can't run stealing-style games like White Elephant, which are a different format — see the comparison.

Who runs it

SecretSanta is part of a small family of free, single-purpose tools built by Jimmy | ORBITFRAME — each does one job, in the browser, without sign-ups. A Pro tier ($9/mo) is planned for organizers who run many groups — reminders, wishlist pages, bigger exchanges — and is announced as coming soon; no payment is taken today.