UX Redesign

We've made a large update that changes the user flow for creating rounds. You'll now be given a simple clear page that shows how to create your first round, with a dropdown for your teams, projects, and views. After selecting, the round is fully created and can be shared with your team members.

Quick Start Video

We've created a video walkthrough of using Spades following the redesign, check it out here:

We're thrilled to announce the launch of Spades Pro, our new business-focused plan that brings enhanced security, control, and support to development teams using our planning poker tool.

What's New in Spades Pro

• Advanced Round Management: Take control of your estimation sessions with the ability to manage participants and remove unauthorized users from your planning rounds.

• Organization-Wide Linear Authentication: Ensure all participants are from your organization by requiring Linear authentication for everyone in the round.

• AI Controls: New flexibility to disable AI features when you need a purely human-driven estimation process, giving you complete control over how your team collaborates. (AI data is not used to train 3rd party models and is not sold to any other company)

Pro Support & Influence

Spades Pro customers also receive:

• Priority Support: Get help when you need it with our dedicated support for business customers.

• Product Influence: Your feedback moves to the top of our priority list, ensuring Spades evolves alongside your team's needs.

Why We Built This

As Spades has grown, we've seen more development teams incorporate our tool into their core workflows. The Pro plan reflects our commitment to supporting businesses that need additional security and control while maintaining the streamlined, efficient experience that makes Spades unique.

The Pro plan is available starting today. Interested in learning more? Visit our pricing page or reach out to our team for a demonstration.

We've been hard at work at several new features, and we're happy to share what been shipped over the past month! You'll notice a floating question mark on the very bottom of every page, on the right hand side. Click that to send us feedback, questions, or concerns - we'd love to hear how you're utilizing Spades, what's missing from the feature set, or anything else on your mind!

New Features

• Added AI Feedback option: Let us know whether the discussion prompts you receive are helpful or not so we can improve our use of AI.

• You can also now opt-out of AI discussion questions by clicking the ✨ button at the top of the page. (Note that this feature will soon be gated behind a paid subscription plan)

• If you find the discussion prompts helpful and want to start a conversation around them asynchronously, click any question to have it added as a new pending comment.

• Added ghost text typing suggestions - have AI guess your next words when submitting a comment and just hit Tab to accept!

• You can now select from your favorite teams in addition to issue views

General Improvements

• Added a new instructions dialog which appears automatically for new users, but can be accessed anytime by clicking the ? button at the top of the page.

• Several performance enhancements

👥 Host Controls

Hosts now have full control over who’s in their round. You can manage participants in real-time and remove users when necessary.

🧠 AI-Enhanced Collaboration

We’ve introduced the first wave of AI features designed to support deeper, more meaningful team conversations. From intelligent discussion prompts to implementation questions, these tools aim to make estimation not just faster — but more thoughtful too.

⌨️ Command Palette + Shortcuts

Speed through the app with our new command palette and enhanced keyboard shortcuts. Whether you’re selecting a view, navigating between issues, or submitting estimates, it’s all just a keystroke away.

✨ And More

This release also includes smoother loading states, streamlined navigation, and better observability — all designed to make the app more intuitive, reliable, and enjoyable to use.

In an effort to improve our database performance and gain the ability to remove our currenty utilization of Websockets which relies on maintaining a separate Express backend application, we now use Supabase for database hosting.

While initilly this change will have no noticeable affect on end users, it does open the door to faster Websocket communications which keep all round clients in sync as the host navigates between issues. Improvements to our realtime functionality will now follow the changes in sync with less latency and allow for easily displaying the active users within a round.

Codebase Improvement

• Migrate database to Supabase

Our initial launch includes viewing issue content and comments, as well as voting on issue effort and saving estimates on Linear issues.