What a free sign-up sheet costs the people signing up

The numbers

Medians per tool, one phone visit each, measured from California:

"Ad and tracking domains" counts the separate companies' domains a page contacted that the Disconnect list files under advertising, analytics, social or fingerprinting. The list misses some ad-tech, so the real counts are higher.

What we found

About 11 MB per visit. The ad-supported sheets were roughly 100 times the size of a Dibs sheet. The heaviest single load was 19.1 MB, a SignUpGenius sheet that played a video ad. On a capped phone plan, signing up for snack week costs about as much data as a few minutes of video.

Most of it is other companies' code. 95% of the bytes on the SignUpGenius sheets and 91% on SignUp.com came from third-party servers. The sheet itself, the names and slots people came for, is a small part of the download.

The page never stops loading. Sheets with ads made about 4,000 requests in roughly 40 seconds, most of them ad auctions and cookie syncing between ad companies. Sixteen of the 20 SignUpGenius and SignUp.com pages never went quiet within 30 seconds. The Dibs sheet made 4 requests, all to dibs.page.

Two ads before you scroll. On SignUpGenius the first phone screen had a banner under the header and an ad stuck to the bottom of the screen, with three more further down. On SignUp.com it was a floating video ad that played on its own, plus a bottom banner. These were on PTA, PTO and church sheets.

Ad-free sheets on these sites still track. The sheets without ads, most likely from organizers on paid plans, were lighter but not clean: one SignUpGenius sheet was 3.1 MB with 16 tracking domains, and three SignUp.com sheets were about 2.3 MB with 7 each. All 20 SignUpGenius and SignUp.com pages contacted doubleclick.net and facebook.net, with or without ads.

No cookie banner for US visitors. None of the 17 pages with ads showed a consent prompt to our US browser, though all of them loaded the industry consent framework behind the scenes. Visitors in the EU would likely see one.

Where Dibs doesn't win. Google Forms and Jotform showed no ads and contacted no listed trackers. Both painted their first screen a little sooner than Dibs (about 0.5 to 0.6 seconds against 0.8), because their servers answered our Californian connection faster than Dibs did. Google Forms pages were still 4 to 6 MB, mostly fonts, and Jotform's size depends on the organizer's header image. Neither can cap a slot, so they work as sign-up forms rather than sheets.

How we measured

• When and where: October 28, 2026, in the afternoon, from one home fiber connection in California. No VPN, not logged in, no cookies.
• Browser: headless Chromium (Playwright 1.64) set up as an Android phone: a 390 by 844 screen, a mobile Chrome user agent, US English.
• What we waited for: the page load, then for the network to go quiet (at most 30 seconds), then 5 more seconds. Then we scrolled to the bottom and measured again.
• What we touched: nothing. We never clicked, typed or signed up.
• Runs: every page twice. The table shows the median of each page, then the median across pages.
• Which sheets: live public sheets found through school and church newsletters, public web archives and search. Ten SignUpGenius sheets (four from one PTO), ten SignUp.com sheets drawn at random from a web archive, seven Google Forms and nine Jotform forms used for sign-ups, and one public Dibs sheet. We don't publish the list, since these are real people's events.
• Trackers: domains matched against Disconnect's public list (October 13, 2026 version), grouped by registrable domain.

Limits

This is a small sample from one place on one afternoon. Ads change with every visit: video ads loaded in about one visit in five, so some visitors get far heavier pages than the median and some get lighter ones. Ad networks may also serve fewer ads to a headless browser, which would make the competitor numbers lower than real phones see. The Dibs number comes from a single small sheet; a sheet with a long list will be bigger, but it has no ads or third-party code to add. Dibs runs the comparison, so check the method before you trust the conclusion. If you measure something different, write to hello@dibs.page and we will update this page.

If you organize sign-ups

• If you stay on SignUpGenius or SignUp.com, their paid plans remove ads from your sheets. SignUpGenius prices that per number of sheets, so check how many you run.
• Google Forms is ad-free and familiar, but it can't stop the fifth person taking the fourth spot. The Google Sheets guide shows a workaround with formulas.
• Dibs is free with no ads on any plan. The comparison of 15 free sign-up sheet apps lists the others that don't show ads either.