Pulse
Lightweight real-time polls - open source & self-hosted
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Kartikey Bhardwaj

Pulse - Lightweight real-time polls - open source & self-hosted

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Pulse
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Most polling tools are buried inside Slack, Teams, or Google Forms, or locked behind paywalls. Pulse is a standalone, open-source polling app that does one thing well. • Real-time - votes update live across all viewers via WebSocket • Privacy-first - anonymous creators and voters, enforced server-side • Self-hosted - deploy to your own AWS account with one CDK command • Dirt cheap - runs on Lambda + DynamoDB, free tier covers most usage • Under 50KB frontend - no bloat, no frameworks, just fast

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Kartikey Bhardwaj
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Hey PH! 👋 I built Pulse because every time my team needed a quick poll, we'd end up in one of two places: a 15-step Google Form, or a Slack poll that gets buried in 30 seconds. I wanted something that's just... a poll. Fast to create, real-time results, no account required to vote, and not owned by a platform that could change its API tomorrow. The tech side was a fun constraint too. I wanted to see how far I could push AWS serverless while keeping the bill under $1/month for normal usage. The entire backend is raw Python Lambdas with a single DynamoDB table. The frontend is a Svelte SPA under 50KB. No frameworks, no ORMs. A few things I'm proud of: - Votes update live across all viewers via WebSocket, no refresh needed - Privacy is enforced server-side, not just hidden in the UI. If a poll is anonymous, the API literally never returns voter data - You can deploy the whole thing to your own AWS account with one cdk deploy command Polls can be public (visible to everyone on the Recent tab) or private (only accessible via direct link). The Recent tab gives you a live feed of what people are polling about right now, it's a nice way to discover polls without needing an invite. It's fully open source (MIT), self-hosted, and free to run for most use cases. Would love your feedback.