Tipperoo
Why
A Tippspiel is a fixture of German office and family life: everyone predicts the scores, points accumulate, someone’s uncle wins. The category leader is a decade-old site funded by advertising and bookmaker odds. That works, but it means the thing you play with your family is also quietly a funnel into gambling.
Tipperoo is the counter-position: no ads, no odds, no entry fees, no operated money — permanently, as a matter of identity rather than a launch promise.
What’s interesting technically
The hard part isn’t the tipping. It’s being right, in public, on a Saturday afternoon when six matches finish at once and everyone is refreshing.
Never score on unreconciled data. A football result arrives from a provider as a number, but it isn’t truth yet — it can be corrected, a match can go to extra time or penalties, a fixture can be postponed after people have already tipped. So results move through explicit provisional → confirmed states, and points are only final once two independent sources agree. The UI has to show that distinction rather than paper over it — provisional points are visibly provisional.
Corrections have to be cheap. Results are an append-only event log. A correction is a new event, not an UPDATE, so the standings recompute from the log and the change is auditable rather than mysterious.
Live push that can’t lie. The tempting design is to push the score to the browser. The problem is that a pushed score is a claim you then have to keep consistent forever. Instead the database emits a transactional, contentless signal, and the client refetches the durable row. A lost or duplicated message costs a refetch — never a wrong number on screen.
Most of the interesting work has been in the seams: what counts as truth, how you prove it, and what you show a user while you’re still deciding.
Status
Not launched. The market page and waitlist are live at tipperoo.de; the soft beta rides on 2. Bundesliga from 7 August 2026, with general availability targeted for 18 August, gated on readiness rather than the date. Bundesliga and Premier League for the 2026/27 season, bilingual German and English from day one.