Your Planning Poker tool is free. Your team's time isn't.

Where the minutes go

Session-based tools, free or paid, ask someone to rebuild the backlog outside Jira before every session:

1. Create an estimation session
2. Import or paste the stories to estimate
3. Send invites or links to the team
4. Wait for everyone to join
5. Copy the final estimates back into Jira

None of these steps improves an estimate. They exist because the tool lives somewhere other than the backlog.

What one minute is worth

Take a 200-person development organization, where each person joins one refinement session a week. Now assume a better setup saves just 1 minute per person per session:

• 200 people × 1 minute × 4 sessions a month = 800 minutes a month
• 800 minutes ÷ 60 = about 13.3 hours a month
• 13.3 hours × 12 months = 160 hours a year

At the median US software developer wage of $65.38 an hour (BLS, May 2025), that's about $10,500 a year in wages alone. But wages are only 68.5% of what a full-time employee costs; benefits make up the rest (BLS, June 2026). Count the full cost, about $95 an hour, and those 160 hours cost about $15,300 a year.

And that's one minute. Most teams lose more than that to the five steps above.

Run it with your numbers: people in refinement × minutes lost per session × sessions a year ÷ 60 × your hourly cost.

Estimate where the work already lives

The fix isn't a pricier tool. It's taking the steps out.

Free Planning Poker for Jira runs the vote inside the Jira backlog and the Jira issue:

• No session to create. The team opens the backlog they already use.
• No import and no invites. Everyone sees the same story, designs, and decisions in Jira.
• One click to vote, reveal, and save. The estimate goes straight into the Jira field.
• No cap. Live, async, and Bucket Estimation, for every team, free.

That gets the minutes back.

The bigger cost comes after the vote

Saved minutes are the easy win. The expensive moment comes later, when someone asks when the work will ship and the answer is a guess built from velocity math in a spreadsheet.

Estimates exist so that question can be answered. Predictive Planning Poker turns your team's own delivery history into a date range: likely, plan-for, and worst case, with the math on display.

Compare the tools

If you're weighing a specific tool, this series compares it side by side with estimating in Jira:

• PlanITPoker alternative
• Pointing Poker alternative
• PlanningPokerOnline alternative
• ScrumPoker-Online alternative
• PlanningPoker.com alternative
• Scrum Poker for Jira alternative