tugethr
From “I’d like to play” to a Tuesday that repeats
Four steps, and none of them is “find four friends who are free”. Below them, the whole product, part by part — what each one does, and what it doesn’t.
- 01
Find an open match near you
- 02
Ask to join — the organiser approves it
- 03
Book a court, if the match needs one
- 04
Turn up. Then keep the group.
That is the shape of it. Everything below is the detail, in the order you meet it.
Every part of Tugethr, and what it actually does
Written from the thing itself. Where something is still being switched on, it says so rather than being described in the present tense.
Find players and matches near you
Discovery is geographic. Tugethr asks for your location once and then works outward from it — players within a radius you set, and the public matches coming up soonest. Without a location it cannot do its job, so it says so plainly and offers search by name instead of pretending to have found nothing.
There are two feeds and they answer different questions. Discover is for people: who plays near me. The match feed is for games: what is on this week, filterable by sport or by a word in the title or venue.
What that means in the app
- Radius-based player discovery, defaulting to about 20 km
- Public upcoming matches, soonest first, filtered by sport or free text
- A map view alongside the list on the web, centred where you already are — it is still being switched on in the app
- Drop-in pings — “I’m free now”, live for a couple of hours inside a radius you pick
Put a match on
Creating a match is the same form whether four people or twenty are coming: sport, when, where, and how many. Everything else is optional, and the options are the ones that decide who shows up.
Two toggles matter more than they look. Public makes the match visible to strangers — it is off by default, so a match is invite-only until you say otherwise. Auto-approve joins lets people in without you looking; it is off by default too, which is why joining is a request.
What that means in the app
- Sport, date, time, duration, and minimum and maximum players
- A free ground, or a bookable venue slot you pay for inside the flow
- Public or invite-only; auto-approve on or off
- Up to five screening questions a joiner has to answer
- Repeat daily, weekly or fortnightly, with an end date
- Vibe — casual, competitive or social — and the safety filters below
- Describe it out loud or in a sentence and let the app fill the form in
Asking to join, and what the organiser sees
You request; the organiser approves. That is the normal path, and it is deliberate — a stranger walking into somebody's Tuesday game is a decision a human should make. Organisers who would rather not gatekeep can switch auto-approve on and then a request is instant, and an invitation you have been sent is accepted in a single tap.
A few things are checked before a request even reaches the organiser, and the app tells you which one stopped you rather than failing quietly: the match has to be in the future and still have room, you need a profile photo, and any screening questions have to be answered.
What that means in the app
- “Request to join” → pending → the organiser approves or declines with a reason
- Auto-approve, if the organiser set it, puts you straight in
- Invite-only matches cannot be joined at all — you get in by invitation
- Spots left are real: confirmed players counted against the maximum
- You choose what the organiser sees — a sport-specific match profile, or your public one
The same people, next week
A crew is a standing group around a sport and an area — a name, a home patch, and the people. Public crews are discoverable nearby and usually let you straight in; private ones work on request or invitation.
The crew is what survives the week the organiser is busy. It holds the members and the group chat, and a crew's match can be set to repeat weekly, so the next Tuesday exists before anyone has to remember to make it.
What that means in the app
- Sport, area, vibe, and a beginner-friendly flag
- One group chat for the crew, end-to-end encrypted like every other thread
- Group video calls for the whole crew, not just one-to-one
- Matches attached to a crew, with weekly or fortnightly repeats
- Owners and admins approve, add and remove members
Booking a court, and who pays for it
Venues publish weekly slots — this court, Tuesdays, 7 to 8, this price, this many bookable at once. You book a real date against one of those, and until you pay it is a hold rather than a booking: it occupies the slot for about half an hour and then quietly lapses if nothing happens.
ONE PERSON PAYS. There is no split payment in Tugethr and no cost-per-head on a match — whoever books settles the whole slot with the venue, and the rest of you sort it out between yourselves however you already do. Payment happens in the app; the browser can hold a slot but cannot take money.
What that means in the app
- Weekly slot templates with a price and a capacity, booked for a specific date
- An unpaid hold expires on its own rather than blocking the court all day
- Card and UPI payment in the app, through Razorpay
- Cancel free before the venue's cut-off; after it, a partial refund set by the venue
- A confirmed booking can be attached to a match, so the match knows where it is
Keeping score, and what a result means
Scorecards are being switched on venue by venue.
A match can carry a live scorecard, kept by the organiser or by whoever they hand it to. Every change is an event, and the score is recomputed from those events, which is why undo is exact rather than approximate.
The scoring is shaped per sport rather than being one generic counter: ball-by-ball for cricket, goals and cards for football and hockey, sets for badminton and table tennis, raids for kabaddi, and a plain points-and-periods sheet for everything else. A match has no result at all until a card is finished — nothing is inferred from turning up.
What that means in the app
- Cricket, goal sports, racket sports, volleyball, basketball, kabaddi, and a general sheet
- Delegate scoring to another player mid-match
- Finishing a card writes the winner, the margin and a one-line summary back onto the match
- Afterwards: a vibe rating about how the game felt, kudos for teammates, and photos that expire
Talking, without handing over your number
Message the people you connect with, one to one or as a crew, and call them — voice, video, or a whole-crew conference where everyone can drop in and out. None of it needs a phone number.
Messages are end-to-end encrypted: your phone encrypts for each recipient's device and our servers pass along something they cannot read. That is also why THIS IS THE ONE PART OF TUGETHR THAT IS NOT ON THE WEB. The browser was never migrated to the current encryption, so a thread in a tab would render half-empty — your own messages there, the other person's missing — which reads as lost messages. Rather than ship that, the web says so and everything else keeps working in the browser.
What that means in the app
- One-to-one and crew group chat, end-to-end encrypted
- Voice and video calls, plus group calls for a crew
- Photos, video and files, encrypted the same way and expiring from our servers after delivery
- In the app only — the browser does discovery, requests, matches, crews and venues, but not chat
Meeting strangers to play sport
Tugethr is 18+, checked at signup and rejected server-side rather than trusted to a checkbox. Verification is a selfie reviewed by a person, and it is the thing everything else rests on: an organiser can require it, and a women-only match requires it too, so those filters mean something.
Your profile is PRIVATE until you deliberately make it public, and going public has a bar — a couple of photos and most of the prompts answered — so nothing flips by accident. Blocking is written one way and enforced both ways: after you block someone, neither of you can see the other anywhere, because a one-way hide is a tool for the wrong person.
What that means in the app
- 18+ enforced at signup, server-side
- Selfie verification reviewed by a human, then a badge
- Match filters an organiser can set: verified only, women only, beginner-friendly
- Report anyone from a chat or a profile; blocking is mutual and total
- Private by default; public is an explicit act with a completeness bar
- A safety centre with the meet-a-stranger basics
What showing up adds up to
Turning up is the hard part, so it is the part that gets counted. Around forty-five trophies sit across four tiers — bronze, silver, gold, platinum — earned against real things: matches played and hosted, sports tried, venues played at, teammates met, crews joined, kudos given and received.
Trophies carry points, points carry a level, and the level is the number on your home screen. Completing a whole tier is its own award. Separately you collect reward points you can put towards things in the app, which is a different number from your level and is meant to be.
What that means in the app
- Only completed matches count towards anything
- Four tiers, each worth more points than the last, and an award for finishing one
- A level derived from your total points, with the next one always visible
- Reward points in their own ledger, earned alongside trophies
Free, and what paying would add
Paid plans are not on sale yet — everyone is on the free tier.
Finding matches, joining crews, chatting and playing are free, and the parts of Tugethr that make it work are not behind a wall. Paid tiers exist for people who use it hard: more play requests and matches a month, much more of the AI help, more space for media, and extras like an ad-free feed and cloud chat backup.
What that means in the app
- Free covers everything you need to find a game and play it
- Pro and Ultimate raise the monthly limits and open the AI features up
- Ultimate lifts the caps entirely
People are not lazy. They are unattached.
Almost nobody stops playing because they stopped wanting to. They stop because the thing that made it happen — a school team, a college court, four friends in the same postcode — quietly went away, and nothing replaced it. Every part of the guide above removes one moment where somebody would otherwise have gone home.
You moved, and you don't know anyone
New city, new job, or the group you used to play with quietly scattered. The sport is still there. The four people you needed to make it happen are not.
Nobody wants to be the organiser
Somebody has to count heads, book the court, chase the money and take the blame when it rains. It is a second job, and the game dies the week that person gets busy.
You don't think you're good enough to turn up
This is the one nobody says out loud. You watch from outside the fence, decide everyone in there is better than you, and go home. It is not laziness. It is a completely rational fear of being the worst person on the court.
The fix is not a better feed. It is a Tuesday.
One court, one time, the same faces. Everything above is aimed at that: getting a person from “I would like to play” to a fixture that repeats, with as few moments as possible where they have to be brave.
Nobody has to be the organiser. Nobody has to already know somebody. And nobody has to be good yet.
“Everyone in there is better than you.”
Eighty seconds, silent, with no words in it that aren’t on the screen. It is about the third barrier — the one a feature list cannot fix. The beats are written out underneath, so nothing on this page needs you to press play.
1:20 · silent, captioned on screen · A player stands outside the fence for three weeks, sure everyone inside is better than him. Week one he misses everything. Week two he gets caught, and gets picked up off the floor. Week three he wins a point and they cheer like it mattered. Week nine, same court, same Tuesday — he is the one holding the gate open for somebody new.
Five Tuesdays
The film in the order it happens, in case you are somewhere you can’t watch it. The lines are the ones on screen.
- The gate
Three weeks at this gate. Everyone in there is better than you.
He has walked past it three times. He has not gone in once.
- Week one · Badminton
Week one. You missed everything.
Every shuttle. He turns up anyway, and that is the only thing that had to happen.
- Week two · Kabaddi
Week two. You got caught. Nobody minded.
He goes down. Somebody on the other side puts a hand out and picks him up off the floor.
- Week three · Table tennis
Week three. One point. They cheered like it mattered.
One point, in a game he lost. The cheer is the product.
- Week nine · Tuesday
Week nine. Same court, same Tuesday. Now you hold the gate open.
Somebody new is standing exactly where he stood. He is the one who lets them in.
Get the app
Getting it is step zero
Everything above happens on your phone. Chat and calls are app-only; the rest works in a browser too.
Available now on the App Store and Google Play.
