Embed live polls in your product with the PollsLive API

If your product has an audience — a webinar tool, an LMS, a community platform, an events app — you'll eventually want polling inside it. Building real-time voting, anti-fraud, and a results UI from scratch is months of work. Embedding PollsLive is an afternoon. Here's the developer path: create a poll, drop in an embed, read results, and get webhooks — with real /api/v1 calls.

Auth: one Bearer token

Generate a workspace API key in Studio → Developers (they look like `plv_live_…`) and send it as a Bearer token. No OAuth dance for server-to-server use; OAuth client-credentials is available when you need per-tenant scoping.

export POLLSLIVE_API=https://pollslive.com/api/v1
export POLLSLIVE_KEY=plv_live_xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

# Every request carries the key as a Bearer token:
#   Authorization: Bearer $POLLSLIVE_KEY
# Rate limit: 120 requests/min per key (HTTP 429 if exceeded).

Step 1 — Create a poll from your code

A poll is a typed deck: content.questions is an array of slides, each with a kind discriminator. POST /polls returns the new poll, including its slug — which is all you need to embed it.

curl -sS -X POST "$POLLSLIVE_API/polls" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $POLLSLIVE_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "title": "Which feature should we build next?",
    "renderingMode": "ASYNC",
    "content": {
      "questions": [{
        "id": "next",
        "kind": "multiple_choice",
        "text": "Which feature should we build next?",
        "options": [
          { "id": "a", "label": "Dark mode" },
          { "id": "b", "label": "Mobile app" },
          { "id": "c", "label": "Public API" }
        ]
      }]
    }
  }'
# → { "poll": { "slug": "which-feature-x7f2", ... } }

Step 2 — Embed it in your UI

Drop the poll into any page with a one-line iframe — no SDK, no client library, and no third-party trackers riding along. It resizes to its container and works inside React, WordPress, Webflow, or plain HTML.

<iframe
  src="https://pollslive.com/embed/which-feature-x7f2"
  width="100%" height="520"
  style="border:0;border-radius:12px"
  loading="lazy" title="PollsLive poll"></iframe>

Step 3 — Read results when you need them

Pull tallies on demand for your own dashboards, or export a CSV for reporting. Results come back per-slide with counts and (for scales) averages.

curl -sS "$POLLSLIVE_API/polls/POLL_ID/results" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $POLLSLIVE_KEY"
# → { "questions": [ { "id": "next", "options": [
#       { "id": "a", "label": "Dark mode",  "count": 64 },
#       { "id": "b", "label": "Mobile app", "count": 41 },
#       { "id": "c", "label": "Public API", "count": 95 } ] } ] }

Step 4 — Get pushed updates with webhooks

Polling the API works, but webhooks are better. Register an endpoint and PollsLive POSTs HMAC-signed events — vote.created, poll.published, session.started/ended — so your app reacts in real time. Verify the signature, then update your UI or pipe the event onward.

import crypto from "node:crypto";

export function verify(rawBody, signature, secret) {
  const expected = crypto
    .createHmac("sha256", secret)
    .update(rawBody)
    .digest("hex");
  return crypto.timingSafeEqual(
    Buffer.from(signature),
    Buffer.from(expected)
  );
}

That's the whole loop: create, embed, read, react. For the full reference — every endpoint, scope, and event type — see the developer docs, and for a worked example, piping live results into an internal dashboard with webhooks.