Claims and Reveal

Two giftgivers shouldn’t buy the same dishwasher. GiftWrapt solves this with claims that are invisible to the list owner until they choose to reveal them.

Claiming an Item

When a giftgiver opens a list they can mark any item as “I’ve got this”. Other giftgivers see the claim immediately and know to pick something else. The list owner sees a normal list - no claim indicators, no spoilers.

A claim can include:

Quantity - how many you’re taking (for quantity > 1 items).
Total cost - what you actually paid, optional.
Notes - private to other giftgivers.
Co-gifters - additional users who share credit, and optionally the cost, of the gift.

Claims are reversible. If plans change, the giftgiver can release the claim and the item goes back into the unclaimed pool. (Unclaiming is a hard delete; there’s no history.)

You Can’t Claim Items on Your Own List

The server rejects self-claims. Guardians claiming items on their child’s or dependent’s list are fine - they’re a gifter to the recipient, even though they own the list row.

Gift Credit and Partners

GiftWrapt tracks “who gifted what” for received-gifts summaries. Credit follows both partners and co-gifters:

If you and your partner are linked, claims by either of you count for both in personal gifting summaries.
Anyone listed as a co-gifter on a claim also gets credit.

This means “what I gifted last year” naturally reflects how households actually shop. Unlink a partner and they immediately stop appearing in your summaries; relink and they come back. There’s no historical snapshot.

Splitting the Cost

Co-gifters share more than credit - they can split what the gift actually costs. When a claim has co-gifters and a recorded total cost, GiftWrapt divides it into even shares by default, one share per gifter.

You and your partner count as a single unit - one share between you, shown together as a pair - because a household pays once. A gift you and three friends go in on splits four ways: you-and-partner, plus the three friends.

You can override the even split with a custom split in the claim’s split editor. Custom amounts have to add up to no more than the total; GiftWrapt flags a split that doesn’t fit.

Either you or your partner can edit a claim’s cost and split - it’s the same household. Only the original claimer can release the claim.

Two people can never be added as co-gifters, and GiftWrapt blocks both on the server rather than only in the picker:

The recipient. The surprise can’t help pay for itself.
Your own partner. They already share the claim as part of your gifter unit, so adding them again would skim a phantom share off the split.

The recipient’s partner is not blocked - they can go in on a gift for their own partner like anyone else. Child accounts don’t appear in the co-gifter picker at all.

Reveal

After the gift has been given, the list owner can trigger the reveal flow to see who claimed what.

Reveal is recipient-driven. Gifters can never trigger a reveal themselves, even on items they’ve already given. On the web the reveal is a whole-list action, not a per-item one, and it happens in one of three ways:

The auto-archive cron fires it on the list’s schedule (see below). This is the normal path.
Reveal now, on the archive badge that sits next to the list title. Open to the recipient and to anyone with edit access to their list (a guardian, a list editor), but only once the event has already passed and no reveal extension is active. If someone extended the reveal, that has to be cancelled first.
Archive all purchases, in list settings. Owner-only, and it only appears on lists that don’t auto-archive - gift-ideas lists, mainly - where it’s the sole way to reveal.

At that point, and only at that point, the claim data becomes visible to the recipient.

Auto-Reveal

GiftWrapt auto-reveals claims on a schedule per list type. Operators control the offset via admin settings:

Birthday lists - reveal claims N days after the owner’s birthday.
Wishlists - same schedule as birthday lists. A plain wishlist isn’t exempt: its claims reveal N days after the owner’s birthday too, so a wishlist owner with a birthday on file should expect a yearly reveal.
Christmas lists - reveal claims N days after Dec 25.
Generic-holiday lists - reveal claims N days after the configured holiday date.

Anyone with edit access can push a list’s reveal later from the same archive badge, up to an operator-set cap. Extending sends no notification, and the recipient-facing wording never hints at whether anything was claimed.

The reveal is independent of email notifications. Disabling the post-birthday email doesn’t disable the reveal, and vice versa.

What the Reveal Surfaces

Gifter names and co-gifters for each claimed item.
List add-ons - extra gifts the giftgivers volunteered. The owner can decide whether to add them to a future list.
Add-on cost if the gifter recorded one.

What the reveal does not surface is what a gifter paid for a claimed item, or the notes they wrote on the claim. Those stay on the gifter side permanently; the received-gifts page never reads them. Cost only reaches the recipient by way of an add-on.

There’s no separate “received” or “delivered” state. A claim either exists or doesn’t.

Orphaned Claims

Spoiler protection means the recipient can’t see whether an item has been claimed - so they can delete an item you’ve already shopped for, with no warning that you’re affected. GiftWrapt handles that case end-to-end so your purchase doesn’t vanish silently.

When the recipient deletes an item with an active claim, the item moves to pending-deletion instead of being hard-deleted (see Items: what happens if you delete an item a giftgiver already claimed for the recipient-side view). For you (and your partner, who shares gift credit), this surfaces as:

A beefy alert above the filters on that list’s page, with the item title, photo, claim details, and an Acknowledge button.
A lighter summary on the Purchased gifts page, listing each list with orphans and a count, so you don’t have to remember which list it was on.
An immediate email if email is configured on the deployment.

Acknowledging deletes your claim row. If yours was the last claim on the item, the item is hard-deleted at the same time. Either partner can acknowledge - it’s the same household either way.

If you don’t acknowledge, an auto-cleanup cron resolves the orphan on the list’s event date (Christmas Day, the recipient’s birthday, the configured holiday) with a day-before reminder email. Wishlists - which have no event date - fall back to a 14-day timer from when the recipient deleted the item.

You can still navigate to a list the recipient archived if you have an unresolved orphan there - the per-list alert UI is the place to acknowledge from. The list won’t show up in your normal browsing surfaces; only the link from /purchases gets you there.

End-to-End Flow

A typical gift goes through these states:

Item is added to a list by the recipient (or their guardian / list editor).
A giftgiver claims it. Other gifters see the claim immediately; the recipient sees nothing change.
(Optional) Co-gifters are added to the claim. Everyone shares credit.
The event happens - birthday, Christmas, etc.
The list reveals - the auto-archive cron on its schedule, or a manual reveal by the recipient or an edit-access holder.
Claims become visible to the recipient on the Received gifts page.

Received Gifts The recipient's post-reveal view.

Purchased Gifts Your gifter ledger - what you've claimed across everyone's lists.

Partners How partner credit works on claims.

Privacy The spoiler-protection rule that hides claims from the recipient.