datly – a Doodle without ads or cookie pain

Doodle used to be short and painless. Today it greets you with a three-storey cookie banner, a “Pro” hint and, depending on where you click, tries to push a newsletter no one signed up for. For a simple scheduling poll in a club, a family chat or among a few friends, that’s absurd.

So I built datly.

What datly does

datly is a lean meeting-poll app, live at datly.eu. You create a poll in under a minute, share the link, and everyone fills in their availability — no login, no app install. You see at a glance which times work for everyone, pick the final slot, and all participants get an email with a calendar file.

Two modes:

• Date poll – classic list of date/time options with yes / maybe / no voting.
• Free calendar poll – participants mark their availability across a date range, and you see the intersection.

What’s different

What I cared about while building it:

• No ads, no trackers, no cookie banner. Just the necessary session cookie. That was the trigger for the whole project.
• Anonymous participation. Voters don’t need an account. Creators can optionally register to manage their polls.
• GDPR-friendly, hosted in Germany. Plain old all-inkl webspace, no US providers in the path.
• Bilingual (German / English) without third-party translation services.
• ICS export. Once a slot is final, there’s a calendar file — no back-and-forth by email.
• CSV export of results, in case you want to crunch them yourself.

How it’s built

datly is intentionally “boring tech”:

• PHP 8 with PDO and MySQL.
• Bootstrap 5 for the UI — no React, no build step, no 200 MB node_modules.
• Session-based auth with bcrypt and CSRF protection on every form.
• all-inkl webspace for hosting — standard PHP/MySQL that has been running stably for years and costs almost nothing.

That choice isn’t accidental. For a side project that simply has to work, I don’t want to babysit a CI/CD pipeline, deploy containers or maintain auto-scaler configs. PHP on shared hosting is exactly the right tool for the job — and it forces me to keep the codebase simple and clearly structured.

Why think this small?

That’s the fun part. My day job is enterprise scale, M365, rollout plans, governance. Having something on the side where a feature can be added in two hours and shipped the same evening is a different world.

If you’d like to use it: datly.eu. Sign-up is optional; voting works without an account. Bug reports or wishes welcome at support@datly.eu or via my contact form.