Why We Built Corgi Planning Poker (And Why It's Free)

It Started With Frustration

For a long time, my team used free planning poker tools without thinking much about them. They were good enough. We'd share a link, everyone would join, we'd vote, reveal, discuss, and move on. It was exactly as lightweight as planning poker is supposed to be.

Then the tools started changing. First it was subtle — a banner here, a prompt there. Then the limitations arrived in earnest: caps on sessions, limits on rooms, voter count restrictions, and locked customisation.

None of these restrictions are surprising from a business model perspective. But they are frustrating from a user perspective. Planning poker is supposed to reduce friction in sprint planning, not introduce new friction of its own. Every time a team hits a paywall mid-session, it undermines the whole point.

The Decision to Build It Myself

I'm a software engineer. When a tool I rely on starts working against me, my natural instinct is to look at what it would take to replace it. Planning poker is not a technically complex problem: you need a room, a websocket connection, a way to hide votes, and a reveal mechanism.

So I built it. The backend is in Go — chosen for its concurrency model and small memory footprint. The frontend is Next.js. The whole thing runs without requiring an account: a guest identity is assigned automatically, so you can create a room and share the link in under ten seconds.

The constraints I set for myself were simple: no session limits, no room limits, no voter count limits, full control over your card deck and point scale, and permanently free. Not free-with-a-catch. Just free.

Why a Corgi?

I have a corgi at home named Kimi. If you have never spent time around a corgi, the short description is: relentlessly enthusiastic, surprisingly capable, and always making the people around them happier than they were before. That felt like a reasonable set of values for a planning tool.

Kimi has her own Instagram at @kimicorgi_ and has been a source of daily distraction and joy throughout the development of this app. Naming the project after her was the easiest product decision I've made.

What It Has Become

What started as a quick side project for my own team has grown into something I actively maintain and continue improving. Features I've added since the first version include spectator mode, Google sign-in to sync identity across devices, recent room history, a custom deck builder, and round activity history.

The project is open source. The full source code is on GitHub. If you find a bug, open an issue. If you want to improve something, submit a pull request. The project exists to serve the people who use it, and contributions from those people make it better faster than I can alone.

Why It Will Stay Free

The reason I built this was that I was tired of free tools that quietly became not-free. I have no intention of doing the same thing. There are no paid plans, no advertisements, and no data sold to third parties. The app collects only what is necessary to make rooms work.

Hosting costs for a tool at this scale are modest. The project is funded by nothing more than the time I choose to put into it. That's a sustainable model for a tool that does one focused thing well.

Try It With Your Team

If your current planning poker tool has started asking you for a credit card, or if you've never tried it at all, Corgi Planning Poker takes about ten seconds to get started. No account, no trial, no limits.