Playleague is the auction platform cricket tournament organisers in Surat, Ahmedabad, Rajkot, Vadodara and across India use for live player bidding, smart budgets, and team management — web only, with separate portals for organisers, teams, and players.
Local cricket tournaments run player auctions on whiteboards and WhatsApp — slow, error-prone, impossible to audit, and brittle when a marquee player drops out mid-round.
A live-auction web platform with sub-second real-time bid sync, Random / Manual / Fast-Assign auction modes, icon and marquee player rounds, slot-aware purse enforcement, PDF + Excel exports, and shareable join codes for player self-registration.
Playleague is a web-only live-auction platform for cricket tournament organisers, with separate portals for organisers, team owners and players. A Next.js front end talks to a Node.js service that owns every auction as a server-side state machine and fans out bid events over Socket.IO, backed by PostgreSQL for the ledger and Redis for live room state and pub/sub. A single stateful realtime service was the right shape: an auction is one room with a few dozen participants that needs sub-second consistency, not horizontal sprawl.
Three browser portals share one Next.js codebase and subscribe to the same live auction room.
HTTPS routes handle setup and reporting while a Socket.IO gateway carries the live bidding traffic.
A Node.js auction engine is the single source of truth for lots, bids, purses and mode transitions.
PostgreSQL keeps the durable auction ledger; Redis holds hot room state and relays events between server instances.
Payments for paid auctions and sponsor assets sit outside the realtime path.
AWS hosts the Next.js app and the realtime service, sized for bursty auction-night traffic.
Organiser creates a tournament, sets purse, slots and auction mode, and shares join codes; players self-register through the player portal.
On auction night, organiser and team-owner browsers authenticate and join the auction room over Socket.IO.
The engine presents the next lot (random, manual or fast-assign); team owners submit bids as socket events.
The server validates each bid against the team's remaining purse and open slots, rejects invalid ones, and persists the accepted bid.
Accepted bids are published through Redis and fanned out to every connected screen, updating prices and purses in sub-second time.
On sold or unsold, the ledger is updated in PostgreSQL and the room advances; marquee and icon rounds follow the same path.
After the auction, the report generator renders squad lists and spend sheets to PDF and Excel for organisers and sponsors.
Clients only propose bids; the engine decides. This is what makes every bid auditable and prevents two screens from disagreeing on a price or a purse.
Websockets give the sub-second sync organisers need, and Redis pub/sub lets more than one server instance serve the same room without splitting the audience.
Bids and results are financial-style records that need transactions and history; the in-flight room state is read constantly and benefits from memory speed.
Organiser, team and player views share most entities and components; role-based routing was cheaper to build and keep consistent than three separate apps.
“Playleague replaced our whiteboard auction night with a real-time platform — every bid is logged, purses update instantly, and the PDF report goes straight to sponsors. We ran four auctions in a single weekend without a single dispute.”
We ship MVPs, AI agents, and production systems in 8 weeks. Bring the rough spec — we'll scope the build inside a week with a fixed timeline and quote.
