So I've been organizing our big family holiday and reunion gift exchanges for like ten years now, usually just hosting a basic shared spreadsheet or using Elfster. But lately, the ad bloat on these free platforms has gotten completely out of hand. I noticed some of them are aggressively rewriting affiliate links now, which messes with the direct shop links I put in for local boutique stores here in Toronto.

I tried setting up a simple self-hosted option on my own server last month, but honestly, keeping up with the scraping APIs when people paste Amazon or Etsy links is becoming a total headache. It constantly breaks. My family is not tech-savvy at all, so I really need something with a clean, dead-simple UI that won't bombard my 80-year-old grandma with popups or weird tracking cookie consent banners.

Since we're heading into 2026, a lot of the old recommended tools from Reddit threads are either dead or went freemium. Does anyone know of a truly free, ad-free wishlist creator that actually works well and doesn't hijack links?