I needed a quiz for one event. It shouldn’t have been this hard.

It started with a sales presentation. I wanted to run a quick, live quiz to make a tech product land with a room of salespeople — one event, one afternoon, one time. Simple, right?

So I went looking. And every quiz platform I found was built for someone who runs quizzes every week: annual subscriptions pushing toward $300 a year, feature tiers, player caps, and a sign-up-and-onboard process that was cumbersome before I’d written a single question. The tools were bloated, limited, and genuinely hard to use — and none of them had a simple option to just run one quiz, once, and pay for what I actually used.

I didn’t want to sign a yearly subscription for a single afternoon. So I did the stubborn thing: I built the quiz by hand. It took hours — a workaround stitched together to avoid paying enterprise money for a one-off. It worked, barely, and the whole time one thought kept nagging at me:

Why is there no tool that just lets you build a live quiz and pay per game?

There wasn’t. So I built it. Quiz Showdown is the tool I couldn’t find that day — a live multiplayer quiz you build and design for free and pay for only when you go live, starting at $4.99. No subscription. No app. No accounts for your players. No player caps. Your audience joins from any phone by code or QR, and you keep every quiz in your own library to reuse whenever you want.

It’s built for the moment I was actually in: the one-time event, the sales kickoff, the class review, the conference session, the party — where you need a great live quiz once and shouldn’t have to rent a year of software to get it.