About Tunebout

Tunebout is a music quiz you can build in five minutes and share with a link. No accounts, no apps, no servers holding your data hostage.

What it is

Pick songs from YouTube or YouTube Music, set a snippet length, and you have a quiz. Anyone you send the link to can play it instantly in their browser. They listen to a clip, type or pick the answer, get scored on speed. At the end, they get an emoji results grid they can paste into whatever group chat owns their soul.

That's the whole product. There's no "premium tier," no notification emails, no pop-up asking you to rate the experience. It's a tool that does one thing.

Who built it

Tunebout is a one-person project by Pavel Gutin. It started as a small weekend experiment to see how much of a "social" web app could run with zero backend — no database, no auth, no servers I had to babysit. The answer turned out to be: pretty much all of it, if you're willing to get clever about how data moves around.

I shelved the project for a while, the way you do with side projects. When I came back to it, the analytics dashboard had quietly accumulated thousands of plays from people I'd never met. Apparently quiz nights and music-trivia group chats are bigger than I realized. So I picked it back up.

What makes it interesting

The technical sleight-of-hand is that the entire quiz — questions, answers, settings, the works — is encoded directly into the share URL. Send someone a link and you're literally sending them the quiz. For bigger quizzes that won't fit in a URL, the data is stashed on a free public paste service and the link points at a tiny key. Either way, nothing about you or your quiz lives on a Tunebout-owned server, because there isn't one. The whole site runs on Cloudflare's edge as static files.

That decision shapes everything else. There are no accounts because there's nothing to log into. There's no "my quizzes" cloud library because your browser's localStorage is the library. Editing a quiz you made works because your browser remembers a token; it stops working if you clear your data, and that's the trade-off for not asking you for an email.

What's coming

More quiz formats, smarter playlist import, better mobile playback, and a small library of curated sample quizzes for when you just want to play something instead of building it. If you have ideas — or you find a bug — the contact page has the relevant links.