Why we built BallPark

The problem with “what's your number?”

Pay talk carries a taboo that has nothing to do with the number itself. It's about leverage: whoever answers first sets an anchor the other side can use. For someone job-searching — especially after a layoff — that anxiety compounds. Answer too low and you've priced yourself out of a raise before the conversation starts; answer too high and a recruiter screens you out before you get a chance to make your case.

The same standoff shows up between friends. Two people who trust each other completely can still hesitate to swap exact salaries, because an exact number is hard to un-know and easy to compare unfairly once circumstances change.

What we decided not to build

It would have been easier to build a salary database: collect numbers, publish aggregates, sell access. We didn't build that. BallPark only ever compares two people's ranges against each other, in a private room that expires — there's no market-rate lookup, no aggregated dashboard, and no account that remembers your history across comparisons.

We also didn't build a negotiation coach or a multi-round back-and-forth. Each flow is a single, one-shot comparison: pick a range, submit once, see a result. That constraint is deliberate — a one-shot check is enough to answer “are we in the same ballpark,” and every extra feature we could add (edits, re-submits, group comparisons) would widen the ways two ranges could be triangulated into an exact number.

Who it's for

The most common use we see is exactly what it sounds like: two people — often former colleagues — comparing pay ranges before a review or a job change, and a candidate or recruiter checking whether an expected range and a budget are even in the same territory before booking a call.