Comment by edelans

I posted https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7873348), a platform free and ad-free you can use to organize prediction contests for major sporting events (rugby and football). We launched it for the football worldcup in 2014, and we also covered the rugby worldcup last year and EURO2016 and a few smaller events (champions league, champions cup... ).

I work on it as a side project with a remote friend. We have added a lot of things (automation, architecture redesign to an API-centric mode, introduction of angular, lots of devops...). We use the project as a lab to experiment new trends and it's really rewarding for that (approx 10k users for big events, with surges of 1200+ simultaneous users which is quite challenging).

We managed to charge some companies who use it for internal constests, and it provides the money needed to cover the expenses but not much more. Still we are happy with it, lots of kind feedback from our users, and lots of learning, which is why we made it in the first place.