Use your own free Supabase project

Poller Crowd works out of the box on this site’s shared connection. If you teach big classes or use it a lot, connect your own free Supabase project. You get your own limit of 200 students at once, and nobody else’s classes count against it. It takes about 5 minutes and doesn’t need any code.

1. Make a free Supabase account and project

1. Go to supabase.com and sign up (GitHub or email).
2. Click New project. Give it a name like poller-crowd, set any database password (you won’t need it again), and pick the region closest to you.
3. Wait a minute or two while it sets up.

2. Copy two values

1. In your project, open Project Settings → API Keys (or click Connect at the top).
2. Copy the Project URL. It looks like https://abcdefgh.supabase.co.
3. Copy the Publishable key (starts with sb_publishable_). Older projects call it the anon public key. Either works.

These are public keys, made to be used in web pages. Never paste the secret or service_role key anywhere.

3. Paste them into Poller Crowd

1. Open the teacher screen and click the gear icon (Settings).
2. Choose My own free Supabase project, paste the two values, and press Test connection.
3. When it says Connected, press Save. That’s it. Your rooms now run on your project, and the QR code tells students’ phones where to connect.

Good to know

• Nothing to set up inside Supabase. Poller Crowd only uses Realtime messages, so there are no tables to create. Leave Realtime → Settings → Allow public access turned on (it is by default).
• Free projects fall asleep after about a week without use. Before class, run Test connection. If it fails, open the Supabase dashboard, pick your project and press Restore.
• Free accounts can have 2 active projects. If you already have two, pause one or reuse an existing project. Poller Crowd won’t touch its data.
• Students joining your rooms need the QR code or link (the room code alone points to the shared connection).
• The free plan allows 200 students at once and about 100 messages a second. Poller Crowd batches its updates so a class of 100 stays well inside that.