Run the pub quiz behind your own bar

Most venues that read this page already pay a trivia company or a contracted quiz master. Quizado replaces that bill. Your own staff, a bartender or a manager, run the same night with the software, and the venue pays one flat monthly price for the Business plan instead of a fee for every show.

Quizado is software, not a hosted event, and we do not send a person. Auto-Host runs a Trivia night by itself: it opens answering, runs the clock, locks, reveals, scores and moves to the next question, so no quiz master is needed. Or your bartender runs it from a phone, with Host Coach, free on every plan, telling them what to do now and giving one line to say out loud.

For scale: one US national quiz company prints a starting rate of 195 USD per show on its 2026 venue sales sheet, on agreements of 16 weeks or more, and the venue supplies the prizes. By our arithmetic, 16 weeks at that rate is 3120 USD before the first prize. Prizes stay with the venue in both models.

Question One describes itself as an entertainment company running pub quizzes and music bingo. Their words for the offer are that the classic pub quiz and music bingo format suits any pub, bar or restaurant, and that it can be tailored for a private event (questionone.com, checked August 2026). The site invites venues to enquire and lists UK and Australian contact numbers.

Their published listings are concentrated around London. Testimonials on the site praise the quizmaster rather than the question sheet, which is what a good hosted quiz sells: a person who can hold a room.

No rate for a venue night appears on the site, so a landlord comparing costs should enquire rather than guess. What is clear from the listings is the shape of the decision: if your pub is inside their patch and the night they can offer suits you, booking is straightforward. If you are outside it, or you want a quiz on a night nobody can cover, the answer has to be to run it yourself.

The picture round is the part of a British pub quiz that everybody remembers and nobody enjoys preparing. Twelve celebrity faces or twelve pub signs, printed on A4, photocopied enough times for every table, handed out with a pen, collected back in, marked. It takes an afternoon of staff time and the copies always come out grey.

Quizado does the same round through the screen. From Pro up a question can carry an image, and the external display window puts it on the telly or the projector at full size and in colour. Teams look up, argue, and type the answer on the phone. There is no answer sheet in Quizado, printable or otherwise, so if part of the appeal is the paper itself this is a genuine change to how your night feels.

The same mechanism gives you rounds a photocopier never could. Audio questions turn the picture round into an intro round. Video questions let you use a clip. Catch That Tune slots straight in. The pub still needs its own music licence for anything it plays, exactly as it does for the jukebox, and that responsibility stays with the pub.

The honest objection to running the quiz in-house is that hosting is a skill. A booked quizmaster has done it two hundred times and knows how to fill the gap while the bar catches up. The first time one of your own staff does it, they will talk too fast and read a question wrong. That is normal and it passes after three weeks.

What software can do is remove everything that is not the talking. The console shows the host the next question and the answer. The screen shows the room the question, the timer and the table. Scores are added as answers arrive, so there is no marking break and no arithmetic. All the host has to do is read clearly, keep it moving and be reasonable about spelling.

Start smaller than you think. Four rounds of eight, one picture round, a wager to finish, done in ninety minutes. Run it once with the staff on a closed afternoon so the mistakes happen in private.

If you host quizzes for a company, you are already doing the difficult half of this job. You know how to read a room, when to slow down and how to handle the table that argues about everything. What you do not own is the night, the material or the relationship with the pub.

A freelance quizmaster can run Quizado for their own bookings. The free plan is enough to trial a pub that no company covers, using the built-in starter packs, and it runs Family Face-Off and QuizoParty too. Writing your own packs is free on every plan. Pro is where playing them starts, and it gives you picture, audio and video rounds and Music Bingo. Every paid plan includes monthly AI questions for new material between gigs. Business puts your logo on the display, adds league tables so the landlord can see the night growing and custom fonts and colours, and paid plans add extra venues at half the plan price.

You carry a laptop or a tablet, plug into whatever screen the pub has and the night runs. Packs you write stay in your account, so a quiz you build for one Tuesday can be reused across the circuit. Check your own agreement before taking work near a venue you already cover for someone else.