Gregory Stahl · Dec 3, 2025

If you're comparing baby pools, baby prediction games, or baby guessing apps to use during pregnancy or at a baby shower, three names usually come up:

• Guess the Baby (iOS + Android app)
• Baby Bookie (website)
• BabyHunch (website, also written Baby Hunch)

All three let your friends and family predict things about your baby, but they're built very differently. Below is a clear, balanced comparison to help you choose the platform that fits your pregnancy and your event style.

Quick Takeaway: Guess the Baby Is the Only Modern Baby Pool App

If you want a mobile-first baby pool app with 40 predictions, custom questions, wagers, a live leaderboard, and active updates, Guess the Baby is the only platform designed for how parents and guests engage today.

Baby Bookie and Baby Hunch remain simple, easy-to-use websites, but they don't offer the richer, app-based experience or ongoing engagement that many modern families want.

Side-by-Side: The 60-Second Version

Can a Stranger Find Your Baby Pool?

Before you pick any baby pool, ask the one question almost nobody thinks to ask: who can see it? A baby pool is personal information. It holds your due date, the parents' names, often your family members' names, and everyone's guesses about your child. Where that lives, and who can reach it, matters more than any feature on this page.

• BabyHunch pools are public web pages. Anyone with the link can open one, and guesses are visible to any visitor by default; hiding them is an optional setting described in BabyHunch's own FAQ. Their robots.txt does not block pool pages from search engines. While researching this article, we found a real family's BabyHunch pool page sitting in public search results.
• Baby Bookie puts it in writing. Their own homepage invites you to let "family, friends, or the whole dang Internet" guess on your baby. Pools live on the open web, and their robots.txt places no limits on search crawlers at all.
• Guess the Baby pools cannot be searched, indexed, or stumbled upon. The game lives inside the app, not on the public web. The only way in is an invite from the host, by QR code or invite link. There is no public page carrying your due date and your family's names, which means there is nothing for a search engine to index and nothing for a stranger to find.

For a lot of parents, this single difference settles the decision before they read another word.

App vs Website Experience

Guess the Baby (App)

Guess the Baby is a native iOS + Android app, so everything happens right on your phone:

• Smooth, modern interface
• Fast and intuitive event setup
• Quick joining for guests
• Easy sharing via QR code or link
• Live leaderboard checks anytime

Because it's an app, it fits naturally into group chats, pregnancy updates, and the everyday excitement leading up to your baby's arrival.

Baby Bookie & Baby Hunch (Websites)

Both Baby Bookie and Baby Hunch run in the browser. They are simple and familiar, and many parents like that they're quick to set up. But as browser-based tools, they aren't designed for the same interactive, mobile-first behavior that a dedicated app can provide.

Predictions & Customization

Guess the Baby: 40 Ready-Made Predictions + Unlimited Custom Questions

Guess the Baby offers the most flexibility of any platform:

• 40 ready-made prediction questions
• Everything from due date and weight to fun, personality-filled prompts
• Unlimited custom questions
• Easy toggles to tailor the pool to your style

We publish the full list in our 40 baby pool questions guide.

This makes the experience feel personal, playful, and memorable, especially during baby showers, sprinkles, gender reveals, or group chats throughout pregnancy.

Here is the difference in one sentence: every question Baby Bookie and BabyHunch offer is a vital statistic that ends up on the birth certificate. Date, time, sex, weight, length, hair, eyes, first initial. None of them can ask who will cry first in the delivery room, which parent will be the strict one, who was the fussier baby, or what Mom's first meal will be after delivery. Guess the Baby's 40 questions span five categories, from delivery-room drama to Mom-versus-Dad family history, and that is before your group writes its own. Vital stats make a pool; the personality questions make it a party.

Baby Bookie: Classic Stats

Baby Bookie covers the classic stats: due date, time, sex, weight, and length. There are no other categories and no custom questions.

BabyHunch: Fixed Categories

BabyHunch offers up to eight predefined categories: date of birth, time of birth, sex, weight, length, hair color, eye color, and the first letter of the baby's name. There is no way to add your own questions beyond those eight.

Wagers, Pot Splitting & Baby Fund Support

Guess the Baby: Wagers + Pot Splitting for Baby Fund

Guess the Baby is designed for optional friendly wagers:

• The organizer chooses how much they'd like participants to wager
• The app automatically scores all predictions when baby arrives and notifies everyone of who they owe and how much
• Participants settle up directly using one-click Venmo and PayPal integrations, or any other payment link the organizer adds
• Parents can choose to split the pot to help grow their baby fund

This feature adds fun stakes while keeping everything social and compliant, since payments are handled directly between participants.

Baby Bookie & Baby Hunch: No Wager Support

Both websites keep the experience purely prediction-based. If families choose to add a prize or pool, they coordinate that separately.

Engagement Throughout the Pregnancy

Guess the Baby: Ongoing Fun From Start to Finish

Guess the Baby is built for use throughout your entire pregnancy, not just at a baby shower:

• The leaderboard updates as predictions come in
• Parents can share updates
• Everyone reconnects when the real answers are revealed

It becomes a shared experience for friends and family near and far to connect with baby.

Baby Bookie & Baby Hunch: Simpler, One-Time Interaction

Most guests make their predictions once and revisit only when the results are posted. Perfect for a simple, low-effort pool.

Look, Feel & Ongoing Support

Guess the Baby: Designed for Today's Parents

• Modern, photo-friendly design
• Regular updates and new features
• Dedicated support and a growing community

Baby Bookie & Baby Hunch: Established, Simpler Tools

Both are long-standing sites, but their feature sets have not meaningfully changed in over a decade: their categories, scoring, and functionality match their 2014 archived copies.

Is It Worth Paying When Two Options Are Free?

This is the real question, so let's answer it directly. A baby shower is not a free event. Most families spend anywhere from $100 to several hundred dollars on food, decorations, and favors. Against that backdrop, the game everyone actually plays, talks about for months, and comes back to the day the baby arrives costs a one-time $19.99. No subscription, no per-guest fee, no renewal. Whether you invite five guests or fifty, the price is the same.

And you never pay to find out whether you like it. The free demo covers up to 3 participants, so you can build a real game, click through every question, and watch the live leaderboard before spending a cent.

Guess the Baby pricing is simple:

• Free to create a demo event with up to 3 participants, so you can try everything first
• $19.99 one-time Full Access for the host: unlimited participants, all 40 ready-made questions, unlimited custom questions, wagers with automatic scoring, pot splitting, and printable QR codes
• Guests never pay anything

So the honest way to frame the decision is not free versus $19.99. It is this: the one paid piece of your shower buys a private, ad-free game with wagers, custom questions, and a keepsake the whole family revisits when the baby arrives. The free sites give you a public web page with banner ads beside your due date. For most families planning something they will actually remember, that is not a close call.

What the Free Options Leave Out

Every limitation below comes from Baby Bookie's and BabyHunch's own published FAQs, so you can verify each one before choosing.

Baby Bookie's limitations

• No money pools. Baby Bookie's FAQ states it "does not accept monetary bets." If you want a prize pot, you coordinate payments yourself in the pool description and track who paid on your own.
• Five stats, nothing else. Date, time, sex, weight, and length. No personality questions, no custom questions.
• Fixed scoring you cannot change. Scoring is weighted 65% to date and time, and their FAQ confirms custom scoring is not supported. If the sex is already known, every player automatically receives those 25 points, so a quarter of the game is decided before anyone guesses.
• No twins in one pool. Their FAQ recommends creating separate pools per baby.
• Frozen in 2014. Compare today's Baby Bookie FAQ with the Internet Archive's copy from 2014: the scoring system, the categories, and the answers are the same, word for word. Baby Bookie is a side project from a web agency's experimental lab, not a product with a roadmap, and it shows.

BabyHunch's limitations

• Eight categories, take them or leave them. There is no way to add questions about your family, your cravings, or who will be the strict parent.
• No wager support. BabyHunch's own FAQ notes that some people run pools "possibly for money" and suggests hiding the guesses; collecting, tracking, and paying out that money is entirely on you.
• Free means ads. BabyHunch is ad-supported: its pages load Mediavine and Google AdSense display ads. Your family's pool comes with banner ads next to it.
• Nothing is saved for the player. Because guests never create accounts, a guest's picks live on the pool page, not in anything the guest owns. If the link gets buried in a group chat, so does the game.
• The same product as 2014. The Internet Archive's 2014 copy of BabyHunch shows the same core product it offers today: the fixed categories, the no-account model, and the no-wager stance are all more than a decade old.

What this means in practice

A free website pool is a one-visit experience: guests click a link, type their guesses, and most never see the pool again until someone posts the results. That is the core difference. Guess the Baby keeps every player in the game, because the game is in their own app: guesses saved to their account, a leaderboard they can check any time, notifications when it is time to settle up, and the full results waiting for everyone the day the baby arrives.

Baby Pool Comparison Questions, Answered

Is Baby Bookie free?
Yes. Baby Bookie is a free side project from Pointless Corp, a division of the web agency Viget. The tradeoffs: guesses are limited to date, time, sex, weight, and length, its FAQ states it does not accept monetary bets, scoring weights cannot be changed, and the product is essentially identical to its 2014 archived copies.

Is BabyHunch free?
Yes, BabyHunch is free because it is ad-supported: its pages run Mediavine and Google AdSense display ads. The other tradeoffs: up to eight fixed categories with no custom questions, no wager or prize-pot support, and a core product that has not changed since its 2014 archived copies.

What is the difference between Baby Bookie and BabyHunch?
Both are free baby pool websites with fixed categories and no money-pool support. Baby Bookie sticks to five classic stats with scoring weighted 65% toward date and time. BabyHunch offers up to eight categories, metric or standard units, and linked pools for twins, and guests join without creating an account.

Is Guess the Baby free?
You can create a free demo event with up to 3 participants to try everything. Running a full game is a one-time $19.99 purchase for the host, which covers unlimited participants. Guests always play free.

Why pay for a baby pool app when free websites exist?
Because the free sites stop at collecting guesses. Guess the Baby adds wagers with automatic scoring and one-click Venmo and PayPal settle-up, pot splitting so parents can put part of the winnings toward the baby fund, unlimited custom questions on top of 40 ready-made ones, and a game that lives in every player's account for the entire pregnancy rather than one visit to a link.

Do guests have to sign up or download anything?
On the free websites, guests open a link, but that convenience has a cost: their guesses are not saved to anything they own. On Guess the Baby, every player downloads the free app on iOS or Android and joins in about a minute, which gives each player their own saved guesses to revisit any time, notifications, and the live leaderboard.

What if some guests are not tech-savvy? Will grandma be able to play?
Yes. Downloading the app and joining a pool takes about a minute: tap the invite link or scan the host's QR code, and you are in. It is the same effort as installing any app from a text message. The payoff of that one-minute download is that every player, including the least tech-savvy, gets their own saved guesses, reminders, and a leaderboard they can check any time, instead of a link that gets lost in a group chat and a pool nobody revisits.

Can strangers find your baby pool online?
With the free websites, potentially yes. BabyHunch and Baby Bookie pools are web pages, open to anyone who has the link, and neither site's robots.txt blocks pool pages from search engines; while researching this comparison we found a BabyHunch family pool page in public search-engine results. Guess the Baby pools exist only inside the app and can only be joined through the host's invite, so there is no public page for anyone to find.

Are Baby Bookie and BabyHunch still being updated?
Both sites are online and functional, but neither product has meaningfully changed in over a decade: the Internet Archive's 2014 copies show the same categories, the same scoring, and the same feature sets they offer today. Guess the Baby ships an update every single month; the most recent major addition is Treasurer Mode for collecting buy-ins up front, released in 2026.

Which baby pool lets you play with real money?
Of these three, only Guess the Baby. The organizer sets the wager, the app scores every prediction when the baby arrives and tells everyone who owes what, and players settle up through one-click Venmo and PayPal integrations, or any other payment link the organizer adds. The app itself never holds or transfers money.

Can the parents keep part of the pot?
In Guess the Baby, yes. Parents can choose to split the pot so part of it goes to the winner and part goes toward the baby fund. Neither Baby Bookie nor BabyHunch supports pots at all.

Which is best for a baby shower versus the whole pregnancy?
A free site can cover a single afternoon. For a game that starts weeks before the shower and pays off the day the baby arrives, Guess the Baby is built for that span: guesses stay in each player's account, the leaderboard updates as answers are revealed, and everyone comes back for the finale.

What is the best baby pool app in 2026?
Guess the Baby is the only native mobile baby pool app of the three compared here; Baby Bookie and BabyHunch are websites. If you want the full field, this page is the head-to-head comparison.

Try It Free Before You Decide

You do not have to take our word for any of this. Create a free Guess the Baby event for up to 3 people, add your own questions, and see the whole experience for yourself. If it fits your family, the one-time upgrade unlocks unlimited guests, and everyone you invite plays free.

Final Recommendation: Which Baby Pool Should You Choose?

If you want:

• A modern baby pool app
• A fun, interactive experience
• 40 ready-made predictions plus unlimited custom questions
• Optional wagers
• A way for new parents to split the pot and grow their baby fund
• Ongoing engagement throughout pregnancy
• A polished app that's actively updated

→ Guess the Baby is the best choice for 2026 and beyond.

If your goal is a simpler, browser-based baby guessing page, Baby Bookie and Baby Hunch can work, but they don't offer the richer, mobile-first, interactive experience that many families now prefer. For more on the broader shift, see why baby shower games are going digital.

Ready to start your baby pool?

Download Guess the Baby and let the predictions begin!