About

Why this exists

Organising a Secret Santa is a five-minute job that most tools turn into a twenty-minute one. You find a site, and before it will shuffle a list of names it wants your email. Then it wants everyone else's. Then the people who don't check that inbox never find out who they got, and you spend the next week forwarding links anyway.

The draw itself is the easy part. Everything around it is where these tools go wrong. So this one starts from the opposite end: nobody signs up, nobody has to give an address, and the output is just links you can paste wherever your group already talks.

The decisions we care about

The organizer shouldn't know the answers

Whoever sets up the exchange is usually playing in it too. A lot of tools quietly hand that person the full list of pairings, which makes the whole thing a bit pointless for them. Here, the organizer page never loads the matches — not anyone else's, and not your own. It's blocked in the database queries rather than hidden in the page, so there's nothing to find by viewing the source.

No accounts, and no pretending otherwise

Every private page is reached by a long, unguessable link. That's the whole system. It means there's no password to forget and no profile to delete — and it means we're honest about the trade-off: anyone holding a link can open it, so links should be sent to one person at a time. We'd rather say that plainly than add a login nobody wanted.

A draw that doesn't feel broken

A random shuffle isn't good enough. Left alone it puts someone on their own name roughly two times in three, and it happily pairs two people with each other, which reads as a bug even when it isn't. Everyone is arranged in a single loop instead, so gifts travel in a circle. Exclusion rules are checked as you add them, so if your rules make a valid draw impossible you're told before you press the button, not after.

Nothing sticks around

Every exchange deletes itself 90 days after it's created — names, wishlists and links included — and a scheduled job does it whether anyone remembers or not. Holding a list of names for a party that happened last December serves nobody.

How it's built

It's a small site, built deliberately small. The landing page is plain static HTML served from a CDN, so it loads immediately and works before any JavaScript does. The parts that need a server — creating a draw, opening a private page — run on Cloudflare Workers close to whoever asked, with the data in a SQLite database at the edge.

There's no framework rendering the interface, no tracking beyond simple analytics, and no fonts or scripts pulled from someone else's servers. That's mostly why it feels quick, and entirely why it's cheap enough to give away.

What pays for it

Ads, and nothing else. There's no paid plan, no premium tier holding a feature hostage, and your list of names is not a product we sell. The site is free because a few ads cover what it costs to run — which isn't much, by design.