Why Shinny Is Free — For the Love of the Game

Shinny is free. It will stay free. No subscriptions, no premium tiers, no ads, no data sales. Free for skaters, free for goalies, free for captains and coaches, free for league managers, free for rink owners. Every feature, every time.

A few people have asked us why — usually phrased as some version of “what’s the catch?” Fair question. Here’s the answer.

Hockey is already expensive

Look at what it costs to skate an hour. Annual league fee. Ice fees per session. Skate sharpening every few weeks. New stick every season at minimum. Gloves wear out. Helmets expire. Pads stink. Tape. Wax. Mouthguards. Gas to drive to the rink at 9pm on a Sunday. Coffee at 10:45pm to keep you awake on the way home. Then there’s gear replacement every few years because something cracked or got too small or stopped smelling human.

Adult hockey players spend $800 to $3,000 a year on the sport before they ever see a puck drop. Goalies spend two to three times that. The last thing the sport needs is another monthly charge.

Software that helps you play more shouldn’t be a tax

The whole point of Shinny is to lower the friction between “I want to skate” and “I’m on the ice.” Putting a paywall in front of that is the exact opposite of the mission. Imagine a sub-goalie texting six captains to find a game, finally landing one — and getting an “upgrade to Pro” modal when they open the app. We don’t want to be that app.

It actually doesn’t cost much to run

Here’s the unglamorous truth: a modern web app on cheap cloud infrastructure can serve tens of thousands of hockey players for the price of a sharpening per month. Shinny runs on Cloudflare Workers, Supabase, and Resend — tools designed exactly for low-overhead operation. The rink data comes from OpenStreetMap, which is free. The moderation comes from rink managers and league managers in your own city who volunteer to verify rink details. Bristol-Jones Group, LLC, the Nashville company behind Shinny, eats the rest of the bill. That is the entire P&L.

We’re not running a Silicon Valley land grab. There are no investors expecting a return. There’s no acquisition exit. There’s no “monetize the user base” deck. We just kept building because the tool needed to exist.

The four things we said no to

• No premium tier.Some apps do a “free, with a Pro upgrade.” That always means the free version is intentionally hobbled. We didn’t want to hobble anything — especially not the goalie alerts, which is the feature most people are here for.
• No ads.Shinny is the app you open at 4pm to find a game for that night. The last thing you want sandwiched between “Skater needed at Centennial 9pm” and “Goalie needed at Ford 10pm” is a banner for hockey skates you already own.
• No data sales.We don’t sell your email, your location, your rink history, or your RSVP pattern to anyone. The data exists to make the app work for you. End of list.
• No “featured listings.” When you search for a rink, you see the rink. Not the rink that paid to appear first. Order is by relevance, by review score, by your distance. Always.

What this means for you, the player

It means a few practical things you can take to the bank:

• You will never get a “your trial is ending” email. There is no trial. There is just the app.
• You can post unlimited games. There’s no “5 free postings per month” limit. Post twenty. Post fifty.
• You can subscribe to every rink in your state. There’s no cap.
• Goalies can use every feature, every time. The “goalie shortage” problem is something we want to fix, not exploit.
• Rink owners get the management tools for free too. We’re not going to upsell you on a “Verified Rink Pro” tier.

What we ask in return

Nothing required. But if you want to make the app better, here’s the wish list:

• Submit a missing rink. Most cities have a few we don’t have yet.
• Claim the rink you manage and post your open-skate schedule.
• Review the rinks you’ve skated at. Ten categories, two minutes each.
• Tell one teammate. The more skaters on the platform, the faster every game fills. Network effects are the whole game.
• Report bugs. There’s a button on every page (bottom-right). It pings every admin in real time. We try to fix things within a day.

The promise, in one sentence

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.

That’s the deal. That’s the only deal. For the love of the game.

Sign up →