Rather than giving presents to everyone, more and more families are choosing to exchange gifts at Christmas, while the significant increase in the cost of living in recent years leaves less room in their budget for Holiday shopping.
“We limit ourselves to a gift of $50,” says Dgina Sasseville, 40, in an interview with Journal.
It’s been a few years since this Quebec resident and her family adopted the formula of exchanging gifts on December 25.
“Before, it could represent a gift of $50 per person. At that price, it goes up quickly, and it’s expensive,” underlines the mother of two children.
Christmas in the digital age
But since the time of small pieces of paper folded in a hat is over, the little family will use a Quebec gift exchange application, Pikkado.
Dgina Sasseville (top right) and her family will be using the Pikkado app to organize their gift exchange this year.
Photo provided by Dgina Sasseville
“It’s easier to organize this way, because we have family in other regions,” explains Mme Sasseville.
“It is no longer necessary to call everyone to find out who wants to participate and to take everyone’s availability to organize the freelance. It’s a way to save time,” adds the creator of this application, Louis Gravel, emphasizing that the number of Pikkado users has truly exploded in recent years.
“We went from 800,000 users in 2019 to around 1.7 million today,” he says.
A way to save
According to Mr. Gravel, this dazzling growth is largely explained by the rising cost of living.
“There are many families who say to themselves: ‘We won’t be able to manage having to give presents to all the children, then to grandmother and [à] so-and-so”. They make an exchange, and that allows them to spend on just one gift,” says the programmer.
“Then there are others who do it this way for ecological reasons, and others just because it makes their lives easier.”
The project of a lifetime
The success of his application recently pushed Louis Gravel to quit his full-time job in the IT security field.
“I left [mon emploi] to concentrate on the site. This is my life’s project. It started from nothing. I launched this in 2006 and then it took on a scale that I didn’t expect at all,” he confides.
The platform, which is completely free, however, faces a challenge. “With ad blockers, my income has dropped and I have to find another way to monetize the site, because the hosting costs are very high. I sometimes have 250,000 hits a day. We have to be able to absorb this traffic, and that costs money,” explains Mr. Gravel.
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