Accounts and your data

You don't need an account to mix

The core Mixer is free and requires no sign-up. When you're not logged in, your session lives in your browser — players, courts, and the current round all survive a refresh on the same device.

What a free account adds

A free account lets PickleFriend remember things across devices and sessions and unlocks the organizing tools:

• Saved groups and rosters — keep your regular players instead of retyping them each week.
• Ratings and rating-balanced mixing — set ratings and let the mixer balance courts by skill.
• Scheduling — create events and recurring leagues, invite players, and collect RSVPs.

A free account holds 1 group of up to 19 players. Score tracking (recording game results, players entering their own scores via a link, and public ratings built from games) and ladder leagues (multi-division seasons with automatic promotion and relegation) are Pro features, available on the Pro and Club plans. Lite raises the saved-player and group limits without adding score tracking or ladders.

Players usually don't need an account

If you got an invite or a score link, you can RSVP and enter scores straight from the email — no account required. Accounts are mainly for organizers who run the sessions.

How browser-local sessions work

Without an account, everything is stored in your browser's local storage — the same place websites keep preferences and offline state. That covers your player list, court count, and current round.

A few things to know:

• Per device only. A session on your phone is invisible on your laptop. Nothing syncs without an account.
• Cleared with the browser. Clearing cache, using a private/incognito window, or switching browsers starts you fresh.
• No sign-in required. You can run a full session, remix, and track sit-outs without touching an account form.
• Kept for about a day between sessions. Without a paid plan, a session you haven't mixed in about a day is retired the next time you open the Mixer (a roster you've typed but never mixed keeps a few days) — but not before a screen asks whether to save the players (free, into your group) or start fresh. Nothing is removed until you choose. See How long a session lasts.

None of this limits mixing: every plan, free included, mixes with as many players as your courts can hold. It's about what the browser hangs on to between nights, which is exactly what an account fixes.

When you sign in, your players live in your group and come back in one click. Sessions can also be backed up to the cloud with the ☁️ Save button in the Sessions panel (Mixer header) — writing a cloud copy is a paid feature, while loading, renaming, and deleting cloud sessions you already have stay free.

Creating your first group

A group is the organizing unit on PickleFriend — it holds a roster, ratings, game history, a schedule, and settings. When you first sign up, you won't have any groups yet. Creating one takes about ten seconds:

1. Open the dashboard and go to the Groups page.
2. Press Create Group, give it a name, and save.
3. Start adding players — they belong to that group and stay there.

Your Tuesday drop-in and your competitive ladder would each be separate groups, with their own rosters and ratings that never bleed into each other. A free account holds 1 group (up to 19 players); Lite raises that to 5 groups and 100 players; Pro and Club unlock unlimited groups and players.

For a full walkthrough of creating, switching, and configuring groups, see Creating and switching groups.

The Groups page as your hub

The Groups page on the dashboard is where you create new groups, switch the active group, and access each group's settings. The active group is the one the Mixer, schedule, and score entry operate on — pick it once and everything else follows.

If you run multiple leagues, checking which group is active before starting a session saves the classic "those ratings went to the wrong group" mistake.

Deleting your data

You can delete your account and its data at any time from your profile. See how account deletion works.

Next

• Just getting started? Run your first mixer covers the whole loop in 30 seconds.
• Ready to set up rosters and ratings? See Creating and switching groups and Managing players.
• Running a season with promotion and relegation? See What is a ladder league?.