Secret Santa generator — no email, no signup, share by URL
Generate fair Secret Santa pairings from a name list — no signup, no email collection, no account creation for any participant. Type each name into the picker (one per line), tap Pick to draw a recipient at random, and share the URL with whoever needs to see it. The list lives in the link itself, so the setup stays reproducible and shareable across phones, group chats, and laptops. Late November, your office's twelve-person team has agreed on a $20 Secret Santa cap. The HR person who usually runs it is on vacation. You drop the twelve names into Plinkr, paste the URL into the team channel with "each person, click yours" — and within thirty minutes everyone has their pick without an email signup, an account creation, or one person seeing all twelve pairings sitting in a spreadsheet. The same setup works for a family chat, a friend group, a Slack workspace, a WhatsApp group, or a Discord server. Anyone with the URL sees the same name list, no account required for any participant. The free, ad-free, no-signup angle is the entire point: many Secret Santa tools require email confirmation; Plinkr's stateless URL avoids that friction completely.
Frequently asked questions
Does anyone see who got assigned to whom?
Only the person who taps Pick sees their own result on their device. The URL state preserves the name list, not the pairings — each new tap on a fresh device draws a fresh random recipient. To run a true "each person draws their own" Secret Santa, ask everyone to open the URL on their own phone and tap Pick once. Their result stays on their screen.
Can I prevent couples or family clusters from drawing each other?
Exclusion-after-pick is not built in. The workaround is to draw names manually and re-roll if someone gets their partner. Most twelve-person draws hit at most one bad pair, so the re-roll is fast. If your group has many exclusion rules, run the draw on paper this year and try Plinkr next year.
Will the link work the same in WhatsApp, Slack, Discord, and group SMS?
Yes — the URL is plain text with the name list encoded into it. Any messaging app or browser opens it the same way, on any device. There is no Plinkr app to install, no in-app embed required, and no preview-card requirement. The link works identically in iMessage, WhatsApp, Slack, Discord, Microsoft Teams, group SMS, or any email.
Why not just use drawnames.com or a similar dedicated Secret Santa site?
Drawnames and similar sites require an email address from each participant, and often an account confirmation step before the draw runs. For a casual workplace or family Secret Santa, that is friction nobody asked for. Plinkr's stateless URL means twelve people in a group chat can run the same draw with zero email collection. The trade-off: no automated email reminders the week before the gift exchange.
More ways to use the Random Picker:
← Random Picker overview