Ask anything. Share in seconds.

Google Forms is a beast: form builder, response spreadsheet, notification settings, per-question branching, and a Google account requirement for anyone who wants to answer. Great for surveys with thirty questions and skip logic. Overkill for "which restaurant tonight?"

Instant Poll skips every step you don’t need. Type the question, add the options, share the link. From landing on this page to a votable URL is under 10 seconds. The trade-offs are deliberate — no branching logic, no file uploads, no CSV export. If you need those, Forms is still the right tool. If you need a decision in the next hour and Grandma is one of the voters, this is.

Where the tool earns its keep:

• WhatsApp group decisions— where to eat, when to meet, what to watch. The reactions feature can’t count votes; this does.
• Team choices — feature prioritisation, sprint retro action items, whether to move standup. Async voting beats a Slack thread that dies at message 40.
• Twitter / X engagement — the built-in poll maxes at four options and 24 hours. Ours does 10 options for 30 days, and results stay live after the tweet drops off the feed.
• Classroom check-ins — pop quiz, topic vote, exam-prep favourites. Print the QR code, project it, and students scan in.
• Event date picking — which Saturday works for the birthday drink? Which timeslot for the study group?
• “Where should we eat”— the canonical use case. This exists because that question deserved a better answer than eight rounds of "idk, you?"

The moment a vote lands anywhere in the world, every open results view on every device polls the server and updates. No refresh, no reload. Bars smoothly animate to their new widths, the winning option (if there is one) glows, and the total-vote counter ticks up.

Under the hood, results pages refresh every 5 seconds. If the tab stays idle for 5 minutes we pause polling so an abandoned tab doesn’t hammer the endpoint forever — scroll or tap anywhere and it resumes on the spot. Creators watching a group vote come in see the fight for first place unfold in real time without touching a keyboard.

Nothing personal about voters is stored. Not IP addresses, not email addresses, not usernames. The only voter identifier we keep is a one-way hash of (poll ID + a random token in the voter’s browser + user-agent string) — enough to reject a duplicate vote on the same poll from the same browser, not enough to identify anyone across polls or link to any external identity.

Rate limiting uses hashed IPs kept in memory only — evicted every hour, wiped on server restart. Polls auto-expire after 30 days and can be deleted at any time by the creator. When you delete, votes cascade — nothing about that poll remains on our infrastructure. Voters are anonymous by construction; creators are pseudonymous (identified only by a random token in their own browser localStorage, never on our servers).

After creating your poll, the success screen shows a green WhatsApp button. Tapping it opens WhatsApp’s share sheet with the poll question and link pre-filled — pick a group or contact and hit send. On desktop, WhatsApp Web opens with the same pre-filled message. Recipients tap the link, land on the vote page in the WhatsApp in-app browser, and vote in one tap. No app install, no permission prompts.

For Twitter / X, the Twitter button opens the intent tweet composer with your question as the tweet text and the poll link as an unfurled card. For anything else — Slack, Discord, SMS, email — just copy the link. Every viewer of the results view can re-share from the same buttons, which is how a single seed vote spreads to twenty.