Why I Built PointPoker (And Why It Will Always Be Ad-Free)
I didn't set out to build a product. I set out to fix something embarrassing. I was in a sprint planning session with one of my teams. We fired up a free planning poker tool — the kind you find when you Google "free planning poker" — the whole session ran with ads pinned to the left, the right, and the bottom of the screen. Persistent. Impossible to ignore. And because these tools serve retargeted ads, they knew exactly who the facilitator was. That day it was a trip to Italy. Beaches. Price drop banner. Sitting right there next to the voting cards for the entire session. Someone on the call said it immediately. "Oh nice, are you planning a vacation?" The facilitator went quiet. You could feel the cringe through the screen. We laughed it off and kept going. But it stuck with me.
When it kept happening
The second time it happened with a different team, the ads were for jeans. Bannered across the screen the whole session, nowhere to hide. Someone spotted them within the first minute. "Hey, nice taste." More laughing. More cringing. A professional ceremony with someone's browsing history on display for the entire team, the whole time. The third time, I stopped looking for a better tool and started building one.
The insight was simple
Most free planning poker tools are free because they're ad-supported. That's a reasonable business model. But it creates a real problem in practice: you're inviting ads into a focused team ceremony. Sprint planning requires everyone in the same headspace, moving quickly, making decisions together. An ad that loads at the wrong moment breaks that. It's a small thing, but small things compound across a team. I thought: if the only reason these tools have ads is because "free" has to be funded somehow, what if I just built one that didn't need ads to survive? Just a clean, fast tool that works — and stays that way. That was the genesis of PointPoker.
What I actually built
I'm an engineering manager by day. I build things on weekends. #weekendtinkerer PointPoker started as a side project with a narrow brief: no signup, no ads, real-time voting, works on phones, and needs to be fast. That's it. No signup because every login screen is a meeting tax. You're asking a team that's already in a meeting to stop, create accounts, verify emails, and then rejoin. That's not a product — that's a barrier. No ads because I'd seen firsthand what they do to the experience. The commitment to ad-free wasn't a marketing decision. It came directly from watching my teams cringe. Real-time because the whole point of planning poker is the simultaneous reveal. If there's any lag between when the facilitator triggers the reveal and when participants see the result, you've broken the mechanic the technique was designed around. Works on phones because remote teams don't all sit at desks. If your tool requires a laptop, you've excluded half your distributed team before the session starts.
Where it is now
PointPoker is live. Real teams use it — including mine. It has a Slack integration, a Chrome extension that pulls stories directly from Jira, and a public API. But I'm not done. The philosophy has always been to meet teams where they are — not ask them to change how they work to fit a tool. So I'm building a native Jira app, so teams never have to leave Jira to run a session. And a Microsoft Teams app, so teams that live in Teams can plan without switching context. Same ethos throughout: get teams the value they're looking for, quickly. No friction, no detours, no "just open another tab." Fast, resilient planning poker wherever your team already works.
The promise
Ad-free forever isn't a feature. It's a decision I made in that third sprint planning session when I finally got frustrated enough to do something about it. It's the reason PointPoker exists at all. If you've ever watched an ad load in the middle of your planning ceremony and thought there has to be a better way — this is that better way.
Start a Free Session — No Signup
No signup, no credit card, no app install. Works in any browser.
Start a Free Session