Introducing ScrumDeck: Planning Poker for Modern Teams

I shipped something. After months of building, testing, and iterating, ScrumDeck is live.

It's a planning poker app. Yes, there are a hundred of these already. But I built it anyway, and I want to tell you why.

The Frustration That Started It

Every planning poker tool I tried had the same problem: friction.

Sign up for an account. Verify your email. Create a workspace. Invite your team. Wait for them to sign up too. By the time everyone is in the room, half the meeting time is gone.

I just wanted to estimate some tickets with my team. Why was this so complicated?

So I started building. What began as a quick side project turned into something I'm genuinely proud of.

What I Built

ScrumDeck does one thing well: real-time estimation without the signup dance.

Click a button, get a room, share the link. Your team joins from any device in seconds. No accounts required for the free tier. You're estimating within a minute of deciding you need to estimate.

The core features:

Real-time sync that actually works. Votes appear instantly. I built this on WebSockets, not polling. When someone votes, everyone sees it immediately. Sub-100ms latency, automatic reconnection if your connection drops.

Anonymous voting by default. This one matters more than people realize. When the senior dev votes first, everyone anchors to their number. ScrumDeck hides votes until the moderator reveals them. No anchoring, honest estimates.

Multiple estimation scales. Fibonacci is the default, but not everyone uses it. T-shirt sizes, powers of 2, or build your own custom deck. Your process, your scale.

Session history and analytics. Track your team's consensus rates over time. Export to CSV when you need the data elsewhere.

The Technical Challenges

Building a real-time collaborative app is harder than it looks. I won't get into all the details, but a few things surprised me.

Reconnection logic is tricky. People's connections drop constantly, especially on mobile. The app needs to handle that gracefully without losing state or creating duplicate votes.

Scaling WebSocket connections is different from scaling HTTP requests. I spent more time than expected on the infrastructure side, making sure rooms could handle teams of various sizes without degrading.

State synchronization across clients has edge cases everywhere. What happens when two people vote at the exact same moment? What if someone joins mid-reveal? These scenarios all needed handling.

Not Just for Scrum Teams

Here's the thing: you don't need to run formal Scrum sprints to use ScrumDeck.

Any time your team needs to estimate work together, this tool fits. Freelancers quoting projects with clients. Agencies sizing features. Engineering teams doing rough planning for roadmap discussions.

The core value is simple: get everyone's independent estimate before discussion begins. That prevents the loudest voice from dominating and surfaces disagreements early.

If two people think a task is a 2 and one person thinks it's an 8, you've just discovered a misunderstanding that would have blown up later. That conversation needs to happen, and planning poker forces it to happen at the right time.

The Pricing

I kept it simple. Free tier for teams up to 5 people. No credit card, no trial period, just free.

Paid tiers at $9.99 and $29.99 per month for larger teams and advanced features like Jira integration and extended session retention.

I wanted the free tier to be genuinely useful, not a crippled demo. Small teams can use ScrumDeck forever without paying anything.

Try It

If your team does any kind of collaborative estimation, give ScrumDeck a shot. Create a room, share the link, and you're running in under a minute.

I built this because I wanted it to exist. Turns out other people wanted it too.

Let me know what you think. I'm actively developing new features and would love feedback from real teams using it.