Building BESTIMATE: rooms that delete themselves
Most web tools begin with a sign-up form. BESTIMATE begins with a promise: two hours after your team leaves, everything you did is gone. Irrevocably. That promise shaped every technical decision in the project.
The best database is no database
An estimation session contains surprisingly sensitive material: project names, who voted what, how much a team disagrees. None of it needs to outlive the meeting. So instead of storing sessions and promising to protect them, BESTIMATE stores them as briefly as physically possible: each room lives in its own isolated compute instance at the network edge, holds its state only for the duration of the session, and is wiped — completely, including its number — after two hours of inactivity. A hard 48-hour ceiling ends even the longest-running room, and a deleted room number stays blocked for a week so nobody can resurrect a dead link and impersonate an old session.
What the team wants to keep, the team takes with them: a PDF report with a session dashboard, a CSV for the spreadsheet, or Jira markup — all generated in the browser, on the user's machine. The export never touches a server.
Honesty as a server-side rule
The core mechanic — votes stay hidden until the reveal — is enforced where it cannot be circumvented: votes are stripped from every message the server sends before the reveal. No browser dev-tools trick can show you a colleague's card, because the card was never sent. The same philosophy applies to statistics: the tool keeps anonymous counters (rooms created, rounds played) and deliberately cannot know names or story titles, because they are never written anywhere.
What ephemerality buys you
No accounts means no passwords to leak. No stored sessions means no data to breach, subpoena or accidentally log. And practically, it means an estimation room is as disposable as a whiteboard: create, share an 8-digit code, estimate, export, walk away. The infrastructure forgets you — by design, not by policy. A privacy policy can change; an architecture that never collects the data cannot.