A World Cup bracket,
built for friends.

Every office had a paper bracket.

Every four years Panama fills up with photocopied bracket sheets — offices, family chats, neighbourhood bars. The ritual is loved; the score-keeping by hand is a mess, and the apps that existed were either clunky foreign tools or gambling sites wearing a friendly skin.

We wanted a version that was clearly ours: fast, beautiful, in Spanish, built around friend-group leagues, and with zero money involved. Just pride and playful ribbing.

A real product, not an ad vehicle.

We treated it like a real consumer product: a strong design system, opinionated onboarding with SSO so nobody hunted for passwords, live match updates, and a scoring engine tuned to how Panamanian friend-groups actually bet — with bonus points for calling upsets.

• Leagues — one-click private groups so the office, the family chat, and the college friends each got their own leaderboard.
• Live scoring — match results synced within seconds, with a per-pick breakdown so everyone could see exactly why they got the points they got.
• Group-chat feel — shareable bracket cards for WhatsApp, post-match ribbing threads, and a tone that matched how friends actually talk about football.
• Ethics — no real-money wagering, no ads, no analytics SDKs. Just the tournament and the group chat.

• Next.js
• Node.js
• Postgres
• SSO
• Cloud

A ritual, digitised — without corporatising it.

Panamanians filled brackets from offices, family chats and friend groups across the country. The project cost users nothing, never sent a notification they didn't ask for, and didn't exist after the tournament ended. The point was the experience, not the funnel.

It became part of the World Cup ritual for our group — and we didn't have to download another betting app.— User feedback

It's the kind of project we like most: low-stakes on the surface, deeply cared about by the people using it. We'd do another one tomorrow.

Visit the project ↗