Ngl, I've been in those exact shoes and it is a total nightmare if you try to do it manually. I managed it for my company last year and honestly, I'm just so satisfied with how it turned out once we ditched the spreadsheets. You gotta use a dedicated app. Just go with Elfster, you really cant go wrong with it. It handles all the address collection and the automated reminders so you dont have to chase people down on Slack at 11 PM. For the shipping budget issue, the trick that works well for us is telling everyone to buy from a local site in the recipients country. Like, if your person is in the UK, use the UK version of a big retailer. Or honestly, just go with digital gift cards if the shipping gets too crazy. We did that for our international folks and everyone was super happy with it. It saves so much stress and nobody feels left out because their gift is stuck in customs for three weeks. A few things that worked:

• Set a hard deadline for addresses
• Encourage digital vouchers for far-flung locations
• Use the built-in messaging to keep it anonymous The apps make it so easy. You just set the rules and it does the drawing for you. No more awkward moments or lost scraps of paper. Its honestly the only way to keep your sanity with 150 people scattered across the globe. Everything just works well and stays organized. TL;DR: Use a platform like Elfster to automate the boring stuff and stick to digital gifts or local vendors to bypass those insane international shipping fees.

tbh 150 people across borders sounds like a huge puzzle but i'm honestly so satisfied with how our remote ones have turned out lately. i think most of the big apps like DrawNames have these technical rules where you can restrict matches by region. not 100 percent sure if it works for every single country but iirc you can basically force it to match people in the same place to dodge those shipping fees. it worked well for us. i actually used ShareProduct recently to help people organize their lists and it made the whole gift idea process way smoother. you could also look into digital gifts or local amazon vouchers for the harder locations... someone told me there are even ways to sync it with slack for automatic reminders, though i havent tried that myself yet. it definitely beats tracking everything manually.