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I run Plain Text Sports (https://plaintextsports.com/).

I got sick of waiting for ESPN to load so I made a site with the goal of providing immediate access to what people actually care about: sports scores.

It's pretty fully featured at this point, supporting the NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL, MLS, Premier League and Champions League, college basketball and college football, WNBA, NWSL, and the World Cup. And for a lot of leagues it has full schedules and standings as well.

It actually was really popular in South Africa during the World Cup when a "super-app" that points users to sites that don't use a lot of data linked to it.

The site is served off of S3 (which is cheap), but there's a job running on an AWS server that's fetching the data for all the games and republishing pages to S3. It's using Ruby and is making a lot of network requests, so it's definitely not super efficient. I need a least a couple virtual CPUs, so it ends up costing ~$60 a month. I could definitely reduce that number, but the trouble just isn't worth it to me right now.

I don't want to make money on it. It's been difficult enough to get people to use it; getting people to pay for it would be even hard. At this point I feel like I've gotten everything I've wanted from the project. (An eye-opening experience into the marketing world; a website that I use every day.)

I try to limit how much I work on it now to mostly just maintenance work. I'd rather work on other stuff. If I started making money that'd just be a number to obsess over, and, honestly, it's never going to make enough money to replace my salary as a software engineer.



This is cool, really dig the text look. Reminds me of https://wttr.in/. I would love to see more of these text-based sites.


I use it every MLB season and love it! Thank you for your work. Baseball is the perfect sport to go plain text, it already works really well over the radio etc.


Where do you get the data?


Really love the site. Is there a way to view multiple football/soccer leagues (i.e. Premier League (PL) and Champions League (CL)) at once?

I know you said you're just maintaining the website, but if there were a simple way to follow a team, that would be a really nice QOL addition. That way I could follow a PL team and see their CL matches as well without having to switch between pages on the website to make sure I don't miss a match. Perhaps adding the team as an URL parameter could keep the design simple?

If you want to take it to the next logical step, there are more leagues that a football club can compete in such as the FA Cup and Europa League. This of course is Europe-centric.


The intention is to put the schedules for everything on this page:

https://plaintextsports.com/premier-league/2022-2023/clubs/l...

The challenge is that these pages are really labor intensive, because I want to show relevant information for whatever league is happening, e.g., group stage points, leg of Champions League matches, and it's really difficult to figure out how to fit everything in just 45 columns.

I complained about it in this tweet: https://twitter.com/CodeIsTheEnd/status/1569489636900347904


This was a life saver when I was traveling in Europe and had limited data to use! Thanks for making and keeping it running.


In similar spirite, when the world cup was going on I used https://worldcup.cole.ws/ a lot to check on it. Much better than all other sites.


I've been using your site daily during the MLB season, the design is perfect. If you displayed a plain text advertisement I wouldn't even mind.


That is an awesome site that I will be using a LOT from now on! I love it when I find gems like this on HN! Thank you for making this!


Love the site. How can I contact you (I don’t have Twitter)? Would love to purchase the ability to use your code for our company!


I use this site every day. Thank you for making it!


Awesome. Could you please add the Bundesliga?


This is super cool


Love this!




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