About
About Sealed Draw
Sealed Draw is a Secret Santa generator. You type the names in your browser, set whatever rules the group needs, and get one sealed link per person to send however you already talk to them. It exists because the ordinary way to run a gift draw online is to hand a company your whole group's email addresses and then trust that company's database not to show the organizer the pairings. Browsers have been able to do the drawing and the sealing themselves for years, and a static site can do it with no company in the middle at all.
What the site is built on
No server of ours. The site is a folder of static files. The draw, the exclusion rules and the sealing all run inside your tab; there is no backend to send anything to, and no database to hold a result. Each assignment exists only inside its own link, in the part of a URL after the #, which browsers never send to a web server. Server-backed tools ask you to trust that their database won't show the organizer. We don't have a database, and that difference is checkable rather than promised: turn off your wifi and the draw still works.
No account, and nowhere to put an email address. There is no sign-up, no login, no verification step and no list. We cannot send anything on your behalf, so we never ask for somewhere to send it. The cost of that is printed on the tool page rather than hidden: 25 people means 25 separate messages, sent by you, in whatever app your group already uses.
Published maths. The draw is a uniform random derangement — everyone gives once, receives once, nobody draws themselves — and every assignment your rules allow is equally likely. For ten people with no exclusions that is all 1,334,961 possibilities, each with the same chance. The familiar party shortcut of shuffling everyone into a circle cannot produce a draw where two people simply swap, so we don't use it. The algorithm, its limits and its test suite are published on the methodology page.
What we will not claim
In a Quick draw, this tool has no screen, button or export anywhere that shows the organizer who drew whom, and there is no database that could. What we won't claim is that the organizer can't look. They hand out every link, so they could open one — deliberately, one person at a time, past a screen with someone else's name on it. A sealed envelope, not a vault: it stops accidents and it stops a glance, and it does not stop the person carrying it.
A Locked draw narrows that. Each person's assignment is sealed to a key their own device generated and sent to nobody, so the organizer ends up holding envelopes they cannot open. Even then there is exactly one moment we cannot protect: the draw itself runs in the organizer's browser, so an organizer watching with developer tools open at that instant sees the pairing. We cannot remove that moment without a server, and a server is what every other tool has. If you'd rather nobody had it, hand the draw to someone who isn't playing — the generator makes a roster link for that, and it carries no pairing, because none exists yet.
Every alternative that takes the organizer's ability to look away does it by adding a company that can see everything. We removed the company instead, and the methodology page shows exactly where the line falls, actor by actor.
Who runs it
The site is built and run by an independent developer, and it will be paid for by advertising on the guide and methodology pages. The generator, the reveal page and the key maker carry no advertising and will not: a third-party script on any of those three pages could read the draw. That is a permanent structural decision, not a launch-week courtesy.
Questions, corrections, or a rule the generator can't express yet? Get in touch. Our privacy policy sets out the one thing this site keeps, where it keeps it, and why there is no analytics beacon anywhere on the domain.