How we work · 3 min read
No ads, on any plan, ever
Ads are the single most complained-about thing in this category. That is not a guess — it is in the review data.
The number
App Imp aggregates reviews by complaint type. Across 1,894 reviews of 15 tournament and scoring apps, the most common complaint is advertising, at 8.4% of reviews against a 5.2% baseline for Sports apps generally. It appears in 8 of the 15 apps surveyed.
Every other complaint category in that data — billing, performance, support, login, UX — sits below its category norm. In other words, these apps are roughly normal at everything except this one thing, where they are unusually bad.
What the category does about it
It charges you to turn them off.
Challonge's free tier is ad-supported, and removing ads is part of what the $12 a month Premier plan buys. Scoreholio sells players — not organisers, players — an SPR+ subscription at $2.99 a month, and an ad-free experience is one of the things on the list.
Both are perfectly rational business decisions. Both also mean the product deliberately makes the free experience worse so that the paid one looks better, which is a strange thing to do to the people most likely to recommend you.
What we do instead
There are no ads. Not on the free tier, not on the TV display, not on the page a player sees when they scan the QR code on the table.
The free tier is paid for by being cheap to run — a night costs us a fraction of a cent in database writes — and by the fact that the people we actually sell to are venues, not players. A bar paying $11.99 a month for branding and a public page covers a very large number of free accounts.
The one thing free accounts carry
A single line on the TV display that says 3strikes.app, in small
grey type under the board. Paid plans remove it.
That is the whole of it, and it is the only thing anywhere in this product that a paid plan takes away rather than adds. If that line ever becomes anything larger, animated, or clickable, somebody should send us this page.