How Estimay is free: what free means here, and who pays

8 October 2026 · Updated 23 October 2026 · 5 min read

"Free" on the internet usually comes with a catch: a player limit, a trial that runs out, ads, or your data quietly paying the bill. Estimay's catch is the ads, and only the ads. This article explains what free means here, what the ads do and don't get, how you can check it yourself in two minutes, and how Estimay is free today.

The short answer

• Free to use. Every feature available today is free, with no trial.
• No limits. Any number of rooms, players and stories.
• No sign-up. No account, no email address, no password.
• No card. You don't need a credit card to use it.
• Ads pay the bills. Ads by Google, personalised only if you agree. Your room's names, stories and votes are never shared with advertisers.

How "free" products usually make money

Running a website costs money, so it's fair to ask who pays. These are the usual answers, and how Estimay compares:

Check it yourself

You don't have to take our word for it. Every claim above can be checked in a browser:

1. Create a room. Open the create-room page: it asks for a room name and your name, nothing else. No email, no password, no card.
2. Look for a price. There's no pricing page, no "upgrade" button and no feature marked "Pro". Every option is available in every room.
3. Count the cookies. In your browser's developer tools (Application or Storage tab), Estimay's own cookie is storyvote.guest. It holds a random participant ID and your display name, and it disappears when you close the browser. If you refuse consent in Google's message, you won't find Google's advertising cookies either, only the cookie that remembers your choice.
4. Watch the network. In the Network tab, the room itself talks only to Estimay. The other requests go to Google's ad and consent servers and Cloudflare's cookieless analytics. The site sends a Content Security Policy that lets your browser run only those scripts, Estimay's own, Trustpilot's review box and, inside Telegram, Telegram's Mini App script, so no other third-party code can load.
5. End and delete the room. When the host does, the room, names, stories and votes are deleted immediately. Rooms nobody ends are deleted automatically 7 days after they were last used, or 30 days for an async room.

The Privacy Policy, Cookie Policy and Security page describe all of this in detail.

So how is it free?

Ads cover the running costs

Estimay is run by one person as a small business. Ads pay for the servers, the database and the domain, so today every team gets every feature without paying.

Planning poker shouldn't need a purchase order

Planning poker is a simple ritual: pick a card, reveal, talk. A team should be able to start in the middle of a meeting, not after a budget request, a licence count or an admin creating accounts. Free and sign-up-free means anyone on the team can open a room on the spot, and anyone with the link can join.

It's built to be cheap to run

Every design decision keeps the running costs small. There are no accounts to manage. A room stores only names, stories and votes, and it's deleted after use. The only bill is hosting, and a modest amount of ads is enough to cover it.

Collecting less is safer for you, too

Data that is never collected can't leak. A product funded by your data has a reason to keep as much of it as possible, for as long as possible. Estimay doesn't sell data and keeps rooms only as long as they're used: the less it stores, the cheaper and safer it is.

What you get for free

Everything Estimay does today. Every room includes:

• Hidden votes and a reveal countdown, so nobody anchors on the first number, plus fully anonymous voting if you want it.
• Fibonacci, modified Fibonacci, T-shirt sizes, powers of 2 and AI tokens, or your own custom cards.
• Per-discipline estimates, such as frontend, backend and QA, with the story's total added up.
• The most common vote saved as the estimate the moment the cards are revealed, and changed with one click.
• A stories panel with ticket keys and a running total of saved estimates.
• Jira, Linear and Trello import with estimates written back, CSV import of any other export, and CSV download of the estimates.
• Facilitators who can run the game alongside the host.
• Spectator mode, for product owners and anyone who only wants to watch.
• Password-protected rooms.
• Unlimited players, rooms and stories, on desktop and phone.

What free doesn't mean

To be fair about it, free has some honest limits:

• You'll see ads on public pages: on the blog, they sit between sections. Rooms never show ads.
• No service-level guarantee. Estimay is run with care, but there's no contract promising uptime. See the Terms of Service.
• No long-term storage. Rooms are deleted when they end or after 7 days (30 for an async room), so download your final estimates as CSV for your issue tracker.
• Few direct integrations. Estimay connects to Jira Cloud, Linear and Trello, if you choose to, but not to Azure DevOps or GitHub: for those you import stories from a CSV file and download the estimates as CSV, so Estimay needs no access to those tools.

What about later?

Paid options may come later. This article describes what is free today, and we'll update it if that changes. Whether the ads you see are personalised is your choice, made in Google's consent message and changed at any time with "Privacy & cookie settings" at the bottom of the page. Nothing about using Estimay is hidden from you.

How you can help

You can help Estimay grow:

• Share it with other teams who estimate together.
• Tell us what to improve. Bugs, ideas and rough edges are all welcome at [email protected].

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