When Free is a simple date-polling tool. It works without sign-up, does not use a database to store your data, and has no intrusive advertising. Here’s a little more detail.
Free to use
I wanted When Free to be free because people do not need another account or subscription in their lives.
There are some running costs now, and there may be more if the service is used more heavily. At low levels of use, I’m happy to cover them.
If the service becomes more popular, I’ll look for a simple way to keep it sustainable without adding intrusive advertising.
Work & family safe
Some free scheduling tools are surrounded by noisy, intrusive or questionable advertising. I don’t want that here.
When Free is designed to be calm, clean and safe to open at work, at home, or in front of other people.
Organisers choose their own poll titles and wording, but the site itself is intended to stay plain, professional and unobtrusive.
Privacy-focused
When Free is built around a simple idea: your poll information does not need to live in my database.
In fact, the service does not use a database at all. It does not store your poll name, your email address, your event details, your time options, your participants, or their availability.
Instead, responses are sent by email to the organiser. The organiser’s inbox becomes the record of the poll.
The site does use a small number of third-party services to function. Brevo sends the emails, Netlify hosts the site, and GoatCounter provides basic privacy-focused analytics. I’m grateful to all three for their free tiers and low barriers to entry.
I do not have a full understanding of how Brevo or Netlify may store data linked to emails sent through their services. What I can say is that When Free does not keep its own record of those emails, and I have no access to them at all.
The analytics are there to help me understand whether the site is being used, how people are using it, and whether running costs are likely to become an issue. They do not store personal poll information. For example, I count when a poll is created, but not the poll title or details.
Privacy-focused does not mean no data is processed at all. It means the service is designed to collect and retain as little as possible within my control and understanding.
How this was built
The idea was dreamt up by me (a human), but was then co-developed with help from AI tools, including ChatGPT, Gemini and Antigravity IDE.
The site is hosted on Netlify. Emails are sent using Brevo. Basic analytics are provided by GoatCounter. Icons are licensed from The Noun Project.
This service is not trying to make money. It is designed to stay simple, low-cost and useful.
