Frequently Asked Questions

Create a party on the homepage. You need at least 3 participants, the first participant being the list administrator. The list administrator will receive a confirmation link by e-mail. Once validated, your Secret Santa list will be scrambled and all users will receive your message along with the name of their Secret Santa gift buddy. We demand a confirmation to prevent bots or trolls from ruining your Secret Santa party. The validation e-mail will provide a link to the Secret Santa party manager.

Yes. It doesn't matter if your party consists of an even or an odd number of participants. It is no guarantee that if person A was assigned to person B that person B is also assigned to person A. Secret Santa uses a macro to make sure everybody on the list is assigned to someone else from the list. This works randomly. For example: if John, Caroline and Steve have been added to a party, John can be assigned to Steve, Steve can be assigned to Caroline and Caroline can be assigned to John.

No, there isn't. But, it's a good idea to add them using the CSV option.

No app download is needed. Secret Santa Organizer runs entirely in your web browser on any device: iPhone, Android, tablet, or desktop. Open the website, create your party in under 60 seconds, and every participant receives their assignment by email. No installation, no account, no friction. This means you can get started instantly, anywhere, on any device you already own.

Yes, completely and permanently free. There is no premium plan, no subscription, no in-app purchases, and no hidden costs. Secret Santa Organizer has been free since day one and will remain free. The service is supported by non-intrusive advertising, so you never need to hand over a credit card or create an account.

Most other Secret Santa tools require you to create an account before you can organize an exchange. Secret Santa Organizer works differently: no account, no app, no paywall. You fill in your participants' names and email addresses, and we handle the rest. It also supports 17 languages (ideal for international teams and multicultural families), and includes unique features like a built-in wishlist, a gift finder powered by Amazon and bol.com, exclusion rules to prevent unwanted pairings, and a party reuse feature for recurring parties, all things not found together anywhere else.

Secret Santa Organizer offers several unique advantages: it works in 17 languages (making it ideal for international teams and multicultural families), requires no app installation or account creation, includes a built-in wishlist feature, a gift finder powered by Amazon and bol.com, exclusion rules to prevent unwanted pairings, and a party reuse feature for recurring parties. Everything is free, with no premium tier.

Yes. Secret Santa Organizer works for groups of any size, from 3 people to hundreds of participants. For large groups, the CSV import feature lets organisers upload all participant names and email addresses at once instead of adding them one by one. The automatic shuffler ensures fair, randomised assignments regardless of group size.

Secret Santa Organizer is available in 17 languages: English, Dutch, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Finnish, Polish, Hungarian, Czech, Romanian, Greek, and Filipino (Tagalog). All participant emails and the organizer interface are fully translated. This makes it the most multilingual free Secret Santa tool available, suitable for international companies and multicultural groups.

After the Secret Santa draw is made, each participant receives a personal link by email. Through that link, they can add items to their wishlist: either by typing a description, pasting a product URL, or searching for gift ideas directly via the built-in gift finder (powered by Amazon and bol.com). The Secret Santa (the giver) can then view their recipient's wishlist to choose a gift. Wishlists are optional; participants who prefer surprise gifts can leave them empty.

Secret Santa (also known as Kris Kringle, Wichteln, Lootjes trekken, Père Noël Secret, or Amigo Invisible) is a Christmas gift exchange tradition. Participants are randomly assigned to give a gift to one other person in the group, keeping the giver's identity secret until the gifts are exchanged. Secret Santa Organizer automates the random draw, sends email assignments to all participants, and includes tools for wishlists, gift ideas, and exclusion rules.

It is possible to exclude some combinations, for example to prevent members of the same family having to buy gifts for each other. Excludes can be configured if your party has 4 participants or more and as long as your party is not started. If these conditions are met, you will see a box called 'Exclude certain combinations' on the manage page. Clicking on this box wil open it, and make it possible to edit your excludes. These can be edited at any time, as long as your party isn't started.

It is not possible to automatically reuse last-year's Secret Santa list and prevent these combinations, as we currently don't see a way to add this without confusing people, sorry.

You can reuse last year's list to create a new list this year. Each year we will send out emails containing a link to do this. You can still edit your list before submitting it again. You can also generate an email here, containing all the parties you made during the past 2 years together with a link to reuse them.

The confirmation e-mail sent to the list administrator contains a link to the list's management page.

If you lost your e-mail (which contains the link to the admin page or to the party where you are participating in), fill in your e-mail address on this page and we will send you an overview of all the parties where you are participating in and/or the parties you have created.

You can add or remove people after creating a party. On the admin page you will find a delete button and a form to add new people. There is only one catch: you can't do this if the admin excluded combinations before submitting the party. Allowing this would mess up the system and people might still be assigned to their excluded buddy, this made us to decide to prevent adding people if excluded combinations are present.

If a participant didn't receive the e-mail for their buddy, the list owner can resend the e-mail for that participant from the management page. You can also change someone's e-mail address from the same page and resend the e-mail.

If you didn't receive the activation e-mail, check your spam folder. You should receive this email within a few minutes. If you still didn't receive the activation e-mail, you will have to start all over again by creating a new list.

Sure you can. Just go to your list management page and use the delete option. All your list data will be permanently removed from our system.

Participants receive a link to a webpage where they will discover their secret buddy. They can add their own wishlist and see their buddy's wishlist on that page. Participants can also share their wishlist via a public link, handy if people outside the party want to know what to buy. Returning participants can reuse their wishlist from a previous year, so they don't have to start from scratch when joining a new party.

If your buddy hasn't provided a wishlist or wasn't completely clear about certain items on their wishlist, you can send them a message. On the page where you can see who your buddy is, you also have a form to send a message. Click on "Send anonymous message to X" and the form will appear! Don't forget that you can't tell who you are!

If your buddy has unsubscribed from emails, we unfortunately cannot send any more emails to them.

You can optionally see the combinations and wishlists on the management page. There are buttons for that, you won't see this by default. If you want to share this information with all the participants you will have to share the URL yourself.

We are a bunch of developers, designers, frontenders, SEO's and marketing people. Secret Santa is one of our side projects. We are sponsored by our employer iO. Our goal is to build a simple, yet very useful Secret Santa organiser. We might also use this for experiments. But the main goal is that we want people to use it, more is better ;-)

Short answer, we are absolutely not interested in your personal data. We use it for nothing whatsoever. Read our privacy policy for an extended answer. Also, at any point in time, you can just delete your Secret Santa account from the admin page.

We have Google ads here and there to cover some of our expenses. Things like hosting, domain names etc. cost money. We basically do everything for free ourselves and all money we collect goes back to the project. We might use it to buy pizza and drinks for one of our hackdays. Or we might pay professional translators to add more languages to our Secret Santa Organizer. Or it could be something else. By the way, we are still looking for Russian, Indian, Japanese, ... translations. If you can help us with this (for free), please contact us.

Any other questions, concerns, or comments? Contact us via the contact form.