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Serve a live leaderboard from a Google Sheet

A leaderboard is just rows sorted by score, and a spreadsheet handles that natively. PasteSheet publishes your Google Sheet as a live, cached JSON API, so your game or app reads the standings with a descending sort and pulls the top N with pagination — no database to run and no backend to build for a scoreboard.

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Key facts

  • A Google Sheet is capped at 10 million cells (or 18,278 columns), which is the real ceiling on using one as a database. source
  • The board holds up to 500 players on Free and 5,000 on Starter ($9/mo); Pro ($19/mo) lifts the row cap for a full ladder.
  • A new high score lands as fast as your cache TTL: a fixed 5 minutes on Free, or a custom 30 seconds to 1 hour on paid plans.
  • Nobody can spoof a score through the API: the endpoint is read-only by design, with no write path. You record scores by writing to the sheet yourself.

Why a Sheet makes a fine leaderboard

A ranking is a table sorted by one number: player, score, maybe a level or a region. A spreadsheet is already that, and you can eyeball it, sort it, and fix a bad entry by hand. For a jam game, a community contest, or an internal scoreboard, standing up a database and an API for that is more work than the feature deserves.

PasteSheet serves the sheet as clean, typed JSON over a fast, cached endpoint, with sorting and pagination built into the URL. Your front end asks for the scores sorted high-to-low and renders the top ten — the same read-only pattern behind a live dashboard.

What the API gives you

One tab of scores, and the query parameters do the ranking:

  • Descending sort — sort=-score puts the highest score first.
  • Top N — per_page=10 returns just the leaders; page walks the rest.
  • Scoped boards — filter with ?region=eu or ?season=3 for per-slice rankings.
  • Aggregates on Pro — group_by with avg or count for per-team or per-level stats.

Fetch the top scores as JSON

Sort descending and page for the top N. No query language, just URL parameters:

terminal 
curl "https://pastesheet.com/your-endpoint/Scores?sort=-score&per_page=10"

{
  "data": [
    {
      "rank": 1,
      "player": "nova",
      "score": 48210,
      "level": 27,
      "region": "eu"
    }
  ]
}

Read-only, so nobody can spoof a score

Because the endpoint is read-only by design, it is safe to expose publicly or hand to a teammate: consumers can read and query the data but can never change the sheet. And there is no Google Cloud project, OAuth screen, or service account to set up — you paste a share URL and get a live API.

What it costs

Starter

For indie makers shipping a real app.

$9 /mo
Endpoints
10
Requests / mo
50,000
Row cap
5,000
  • Custom cache TTL
  • Aggregation & rollups
  • Private endpoints & keys
Choose Starter

Start on Starter ($9/mo) for a custom cache TTL, so a fresh high score shows up in seconds. Free is fine for a slow-moving board on a 5-minute cache; Pro adds aggregation (avg, count, group_by) for per-team and per-level stats.

Compare plans Start free

Frequently asked questions

How do I get just the top ten?

Sort descending and cap the page size: sort=-score with per_page=10. The API returns the ten highest rows; increase per_page or step through pages to show more of the board.

How fresh are the scores?

As fresh as your cache TTL. The Free plan refreshes every 5 minutes; paid plans let you set a TTL as low as 30 seconds, so a new high score reaches the board almost immediately.

Can players write scores through the API?

No. PasteSheet is read-only by design — there is no write path. The endpoint only serves the standings, so nobody can spoof a score through it. You record scores by writing to the sheet yourself.

Can I have separate boards per region or season?

Yes. Keep a region or season column and filter with ?region=eu or ?season=3. One sheet can back many scoped leaderboards, each just a different query against the same rows.

Sources

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