There's a moment I remember from last year. I was trying to run four polls in a single working session — a quick icebreaker, a scoring question, an open Q&A, and a wrap-up. Four polls. One afternoon. I ended up using three different tools to get through them, because each one hit a paywall before I was done.
The first capped me at two questions on the free tier. The second let me run the quiz but blurred the word cloud behind a "Pro plan required" banner. The third worked fine until eleven people couldn't submit, because the free cap was fifty participants and the room was bigger than that.
If you've run more than a handful of sessions using any of the big audience tools, you've lived a version of this scene. You know the feeling of the progress bar creeping toward the limit. You know the moment when someone in the back says their phone just told them the session is full. You know the particular embarrassment of telling a room you have to pause for a minute while you figure something out, while they wait.
We built livepoll.io because we got tired of it. Every feature, every question type, every limit the other tools charge for — free on livepoll.io. No credit card. No account required for participants. No expiring trial. No "Pro" tier hiding the good stuff.
That probably sounds like a trick. I will spend the rest of this post explaining why it isn't.
The skepticism is fair
"Everything is free" is a red flag. It should be. If you've been on the internet long enough, you know that most free tools are one of three things: a data collection operation, a bait-and-switch where the good features move behind paid service once you're hooked, or a dying service that used to be useful but unable to keep up due to funding.
Audience polling tools have a particular version of this. The free tier is strategically broken — just useful enough to get you to present with it in front of an audience, just limited enough to make you upgrade in the middle of your first real session. Two questions. Fifty participants. No word clouds. No export. No leaderboard. The feature set is carefully calibrated to fail you at the moment you most need it to work.
So when we tell you every feature is free forever on livepoll.io, you are right to be suspicious. We would be suspicious too.
The rest of this post answers three questions directly: What does "free" actually include? How do we pay for it? And why won't we change our minds about it a year from now?
What "free forever" actually includes
Here's the whole free tier, plainly:
- Up to 1,000 participants per session. Not 50. Not 100. A thousand people can join the same poll, and you don't pay a cent.
- Every question type. Multiple choice, word cloud, open Q&A, rating scale, ranking, image choice, quiz with leaderboard, spinner wheel, content slides. If it's a type we've built, you can use it.
- Unlimited questions per session and unlimited sessions per account. No limitations on how much you can run.
- Live results, PDF export, CSV export, QR codes, presenter notes. The workflow features that other tools charge for are just part of how livepoll.io works.
- All templates. Q&A moderation. Anonymous responses. Public results links. The things that turn a poll into an actual engagement tool — all in.
- The AI session builder. You describe what you want to run, it drafts a session for you. Fair-use limits apply — enough for normal use, you won't hit them — but there's no paywall. We put fair-use limits on this feature because we want to keep it free for everyone. The limits exist to stop bad actors from running up AI costs that would eventually force us to make it paid and make us go back on our public promises for real users.
If it's on the site today, it's in the free tier. That's the list. There's no footnote. There's no "Pro-only" asterisk. There's no feature that was in free yesterday and quietly moved behind paid tier this week.
Two small things we do charge for, and I want to name them because this is the "too good to be true" section and skipping them would be dishonest:
White Label ($49/month). If you want to hide livepoll.io branding entirely and use your own logo, colors, and domain, that's $49/month. Corporate training teams, universities running brand-sensitive events, and agencies reselling live sessions use this. It doesn't add or remove a single feature. You could run the exact same session for free, with livepoll.io branding on the participant join screen.
SSO / SAML ($99/month). If your IT department requires Single Sign-On via Google Workspace, Microsoft Azure, Okta, or any SAML 2.0 provider, that's $99/month. Required only by enterprise buyers whose security policies mandate it. Most users will never encounter this.
Neither is a feature tier. They're both infrastructure for specific deployment needs. If you're not an enterprise IT buyer or a reseller, you'll never need to think about either one.
How we actually pay for it
Ads. Specifically: participant-facing ads in two very narrow places, never shown to presenters, never interrupting a live session. That's it. That's the model.
Here's exactly where ads will appear:
The Join page — the screen participants see after they enter the session code and before the host goes live. They see a code input, a name field, and a small banner ad while they wait for the session to start. They're standing in a lecture hall or sitting in a meeting room. The ad is there for 10 seconds, 30 seconds, maybe two minutes depending on when the presenter starts. Then they're in the session and the ad is gone.
The public results page — the shareable link you can send to someone who wasn't in the room. Those pages carry a banner ad. If someone is browsing results from a session they weren't part of, they see an ad alongside the content.
That's the whole ad surface. Nothing else.
Here is explicitly where ads never appear:
The presenter dashboard. The session creation screen. The live presenter view. The projector mode. The settings page. The admin interface. Anything you, as the person running a session, ever see — ad-free. Always. We will not put ads in front of you while you're trying to run a session. We will not interrupt a live poll to show a promoted message. We will not make you wait 15 seconds before your results load.
This is a rule we wrote down on the Promises page because it's the one most likely to get quietly eroded under future pressure. If ad revenue ever drops, the temptation for every software company is to find a new surface and start putting ads on it. We're telling you up front that we won't, and putting it in writing so you can hold us to it.
Participants see brief ads, in specific places, during specific moments when nothing else is happening. That's the trade. The people running sessions — teachers, trainers, lecturers, team leads, managers, facilitators, conference organizers — run clean poll sessions. The people showing up as participants see a few seconds of ad while they wait. The math will work to cover infrastructure and other costs for running this free for the users.
We also won't sell your data. We don't build behavioral profiles to sell to advertisers. We don't share session content with anyone outside the systems that actually run the polls. The ads are served by third-party networks that do not receive the content of your sessions — they see the ad slot, they don't see what you're asking. Your poll questions, your participants' answers, your session history — those stay in our database and they stay yours. We have explained it in more detail on the privacy page if you want the full breakdown.
Why we won't change our minds
The cynical pattern in software companies is well-known: launch with a generous free tier, build a user base, then start moving free features behind paid plans once you need revenue. The early adopters get quietly pushed to paid service or moved out. The product slowly becomes what it replaced.
We know this pattern. We got tired of being on the receiving end of it. So here is what we have committed to, in writing on the Promises page, that you can hold us to:
We will never make a feature paid that is free today. If it works on livepoll.io this afternoon, it works on livepoll.io next year, and the year after that. If we build new features, we charge for them only in the rare case that they are genuinely expensive infrastructure cost for specific customers — the White Label and SSO cases above. Features that expand what you can do in a poll — new question types, new exports, new integrations — will always be free.
We will never make the free experience worse to push upgrades. No "your session is queued" because too many other free users are active. No arbitrary limits that used to be higher. No "Pro users get priority" tricks that make the experience worse for everyone else.
We will never sell your data. Not in five years, not for any price, not to anyone. The big tech companies have made selling user data a normal business practice. We think it is wrong. If we ever end up in a position where selling data is the only way to keep the lights on, consider us out of business. The Privacy page spells out exactly what we store and for how long.
We will never become the thing we replaced.
These commitments exist because the only way to keep a thing free forever is to bolt that promise to the mast before growth creates pressure to break it. The Promises page is the mast. These rules are what is bolted to it. We actually want you to hold us to our public promises. This is our commitment. A commitment the way a partner makes a commitment to the person they love — meaning it and living it, not lawyering it. We don't want to hide behind legal loopholes.
Will we ever need to raise money to scale? Possibly. But the plan is to raise on the strength of user traction and a sustainable ad model, not by gating features. If a future investor ever pressures us to make features paid that are free today, we would rather stay small than take that money. We mean it, and the Promises page means we have to mean it.
Who this is for
"Whether you're a teacher with 30 students or a business with 300 employees" is the mission statement written across the top of our homepage, and we mean it as a promise, not a slogan. Every choice we make in the product is weighed against whether it serves both ends of that range.
If you're a sixth-grade teacher running a vocabulary check on Friday morning, livepoll.io is built for you. The join flow is as simple as it gets — a six-digit code, no account needed for students, no app install, works on any phone or Chromebook.
The AI session builder means you can type "twenty-question quiz on calculus, a neuroscience chapter, or a township bylaw" and have a session ready in 20 seconds. You can run the same tool for your 8:00 class, your 10:30 class, and your after-school tutoring session without ever hitting a limit.
If you're a corporate trainer running a workshop for 200 people on Monday morning, livepoll.io is built for you too. The same features — the unlimited questions, the 1,000-participant cap, the exports, the leaderboards — apply. No separate product line. No "corporate plan" required. If your company wants to strip our branding and put yours on it, White Label is there. Otherwise the free tier runs your workshop end to end.
If you're a professor running a large lecture hall, livepoll.io is built for you. Word clouds for open-response questions, rating scales for course feedback, anonymous Q&A for the questions students won't ask out loud, content slides to walk through material between poll questions.
If you're a conference organizer running a 600-person keynote Q&A, a facilitator running a team retrospective, a community manager running a town hall — it works. The product doesn't care what your job title is. The room doesn't care what your room is.
We don't have a "Teacher Plan" or a "Business Plan" because the feature set is the same either way. That is intentional — the best features should be available to everyone, not gated behind who you work for.
What livepoll.io still isn't built for: anything that needs SOC 2 compliance out of the box, FERPA or HIPAA attestation, or complex integrations with Workday or Salesforce. Those are real enterprise needs served by real enterprise tools. Our SSO option covers the most common enterprise gate — identity management — but if your IT security review is longer than a page, we're probably not the right fit yet. We'll get there. We're just not there today.
Back to the scene
Four polls. One afternoon. Three tools. Twenty minutes of pure chaos and embarrassment.
When we built livepoll.io our goal was to make sure that none of the users ever have to go through the embarrassment and chaos when they do the work on our product. Not today. Not tomorrow. Not five years from now.
You enter a session code, you set up your questions, you run your session, you see the results. The people in the room see the poll, answer it, move on. You get your export. No one hits a paid service upgrade need. No one gets cut off. No one has to create an account they don't want.
Every feature is free. A thousand participants is free. The AI builder is free. The exports are free. Running this next week is free, and running it a year from now will still be free. We keep the lights on with narrow ads shown to participants on the join screen and the public results page — never to you, never during a live session, never at a moment that matters.
And when the pressure to make something paid comes, because it will, the Promises page will be sitting there as a public commitment we've made to you and to ourselves.
Start a session → — free, no account, no credit card.