For the love of the game.

We built Shinny because finding pickup hockey shouldn’t be the hard part of playing pickup hockey. Three group chats, a Facebook scroll, a sub-list buried in someone’s email, a rink’s outdated webpage from 2017. That’s the tax every skater and goalie pays just to get on the ice. Shinny exists to make that tax zero.

The decision to never charge was easy. Hockey is already expensive — gear, ice, refs, league fees, gas to the rink at 9pm Sunday, the second pair of skates because the first ones gave you a hot spot. The last thing the sport needs is another subscription. So we don’t have one. We don’t have a “premium” tier with hidden goalie alerts behind it. We don’t have ads sandwiched between your skate-night pings. We don’t sell your email. The app is free for skaters, free for goalies, free for captains, free for coaches, free for league managers, free for rink owners. Everyone, every feature, every time.

You might wonder how that works. The honest answer is that Shinny costs almost nothing to run. A modern web app sitting on cheap cloud infrastructure can serve a lot of hockey players for the price of a sharpening per month. We’re a small operation out of Nashville, the rink data comes from OpenStreetMap plus community submissions, and the moderation comes from rink managers and league managers in your own city who volunteer their time. Bristol-Jones Group, LLC eats the server bill. That’s the whole P&L.

If the day ever comes when keeping Shinny free isn’t possible without changing what it is, we’ll shut it down before we put it behind a paywall. We don’t plan to. We don’t want to. But the principle is more important than the project. If we can’t do this for the love of the game, we won’t do it at all.

What “free” means here

• Free to find ice. Subscribe to any rink, set your skill level, and get pinged the moment something opens up.
• Free to post games.Pickup, stick & puck, tryouts, open skate, rink events. All of it. Unlimited.
• Free to recruit. Captains can mark their team as recruiting, run a tryout announcement, invite players by email.
• Free for goalies. The most-wanted people in adult hockey deserve the smoothest path to ice. Goalies use Shinny for free, forever.
• Free for rink owners. Claim your rink, post open-skate schedules, send closure alerts. Read your reviews. Win Rink of the Year awards.
• Free to report bugs.See that little “Report a bug” button bottom-right? It pings every admin in real time. We try to fix things within a day.

Who’s behind this

Shinny is a product of Bristol-Jones Group, LLC, based in Nashville, Tennessee. The founders skate adult pickup at local rinks and have been on the wrong end of every variation of the “5 skaters short tonight” group text. We don’t have investors to please. There’s no acquisition exit. Just a tool that should have existed years ago, built by people who actually use it.

If you want to make the app better — submit a missing rink, claim the one you manage, review the rinks you’ve skated, or tell a captain about us — that’s the whole business model. The more skaters on the platform, the faster every game fills.

A note on the name

“Shinny” is the older Canadian word for pickup hockey — a word with roots in Scottish shinty from the 1700s. It carries the spirit we’re trying to bring back: whoever shows up plays. No paywalls. No paperwork. Full story here.

Three things to do next

1. Sign up — takes 30 seconds.
2. Find your rink and follow it.
3. Tell one teammate. That’s how the network grows.

For the love of the game. — The Shinny team