Introducing Tiny Power-Ups Club - 11 Power-Ups for just $1 per month

[#1]

👋 Hi, Trello Community! We’re Sammy and Adam from the Tiny Power-Ups Club - a two-person team building the most affordable and powerful collection of Trello Power-Ups.

Over the last six months, we’ve created and shipped 11 Power-Ups that have been collectively installed on over 30,000 Trello boards. We recently reached a major milestone of 1000 paying customers. 🎉

Who are we?

We both used to work at Atlassian on Trello - with a collective total of 7 years of experience working on the Trello product.

Sammy was the legendary designer and illustrator that define the iconic brand and illustration style that is still used by Trello today.

Adam was a Senior Software Engineer on the Trello team where he:

• maintained the Power-Ups API and SDK,
• built the Trello Power-Ups directory,
• built the Trello Admin Portal,
• was one of the founding engineers that created the Atlassian Forge platform,
• built the Map View, List Limits, and Read Me Power-Ups,
• built the Workspace Table View,
• built the secret confetti feature in Trello 🎉,
• implemented the color and full card covers feature,
• implemented GIPHY stickers for Trello,
• implemented the Link Cards feature for Trello

So it's pretty safe to say that we know Trello pretty well. 😂

Why “Tiny”?

It’s actually quite a sentimental thing. We named our company the “Tiny Power-Ups Club” after our late friend and colleague Tiny who passed away a few years ago. We were all Trello employees and connected during our time there. Tiny was an amazing person and extremely talented creative that pushed the illustration and brand of Trello to new heights. This is not the greatest Power-Up company in the world, this is just a tribute.

The word “tiny” also plays into our belief that Power-Ups don’t need to be overly complex and filled with a bunch of features to be useful. Sometimes you just want a Power-Up to solve a simple niche problem. Instead of bundling all of our features into one super Power-Ups, we decided to break it down into tiny Power-Ups to keep things simple and discoverable.

Why is it so cheap?

Our pricing model is simple - if you’re an individual Trello user then it’ll cost you $1 per month (or $10 if billed annually) and if you want it for your workspace/team, it’s $1 per member per month.

When we started Tiny Power-Ups Club one of the things we really want to do was to give back to the Trello community so keeping this cheap and affordable was a big theme.

A common complaint from Trello users is that some Power-Ups charge way too much - some would even be more expensive than Trello’s Standard and Premium plans. So we want to make sure that we will always charge less than Trello’s paid plans to keeps affordable and accessible to free users but also to folks outside of the United States.

We keep billing and payments simple by only asking for a single subscription for access to all of our existing and future Power-Ups so that admins and business owners don’t need to deal with multiple invoices every month. It’s a single bill for everything.

We believe our pricing structure gives us a competitive edge when compared to the other Power-Ups out there in the market.

How are we able to build Power-Ups so quickly?

We’ve built and shipped 11 Power-Ups in six months. On average it takes about 2 weeks for us to ship a new Power-Up. One week to build and submit the Power-Up and another week addressing any issues from the Trello Power-Up Review team.

A major reason why we’re able to move so quickly is that Adam used to be the guy who maintained the Power-Ups platform while he worked at Atlassian - so he has an extremely deep understanding of what’s possible with the platform and all of the best practices.

But another factor is our internal platform which abstracts and encapsulates all the logic surrounding payments, subscriptions, trials, authentication, rate limiting, and accessing the Trello API. Before we even started building Power-Ups, we spent 2 months creating a bunch of reusable services, packages, and modules to allow us to move quickly and write code for the things that matter.

As mentioned above, we also like to keep our Power-Ups small and bite-sized. This also allows us to keep the code very simple, clean, and maintainable. If you don't have a bunch of complex features, you’ll find that your code stays quite simple which in turn allows us to write high quality and bug-free Power-Ups. This has also been the reason why we rarely have to spend any time fixing bugs or doing support. It allows us to run a very low-touch business.

What have we built so far?

• File Manager - Easily access and manage all of a board's file attachments in one convenient place.
• External Share - Share your board, card, or attachments with anyone outside of Trello without having to add them to your board or team!
• Board Chat - Add a chat room to any Trello board.
• Board and Card Keys - Assign unique keys and short-links to a board and its cards.
• Card Approvals - For workflows that need cards to be approved at different stages.
• Analytics - Track views across boards & cards, integrate with Google analytics.
• Archive Manager - View and manage your archived lists and cards into a rich board view!
• Office File Viewer - Preview Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint attachment files directly in Trello.
• Durations - Clearly show how long cards have been in their current list, current board, and the time left until they are due!
• Gallery View - Display your image attachments in an awesome Pinterest-style gallery!
• Table View - View your board in a powerful, and manageable table format. Search, filter, sort, and perform bulk actions.

What’s next?

Before we start shipping more Power-Ups, we want to focus our efforts on a few things:

• Internationalization - Trello has a huge user base and a good chunk of them reside outside of English-speaking countries. We believe that translating our listings and in-app strings to other languages will help us grow our user base.
• Enabling more payment options so folks outside of the United States and people without credit cards can easily subscribe. We’re currently thinking about adding more payment providers and exploring crypto payments.
• Marketing - we’ve spent most of our efforts in the last six months coding, designing, and shipping so it’s time to focus some of that energy on marketing. We’re thinking email campaigns, writing blogs and articles on how to effectively use our Power-Ups, and creating Trello board templates highlighting our Power-Ups.

But hey, if you have any Power-Up requests or if there’s a Power-Up out there that you think is too expensive - hit us up at help@samchop.com and maybe we can build it and add it to our suite of Power-Ups!

Join the Tiny Power-Ups Club at: https://tinypowerups.com/manage-subscription

Cheers,

Adam & Sammy ❤️

[Sam Bayley]

Hi Adam,

Any chance of helping with this:

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Trello-questions/Trello-Sum-custom-Fields/qaq-p/1953112#M58994

To me it is a glaring short coming for analytics of your Trello boards and lists.

Cheers,
Sam

[Monique vdB]

@Adam Cao thanks for sharing with our community - but please take a look at our guidelines for partners and vendors around promotional posts. If you have any questions, I am at communitymanagers@atlassian.com!  

[prathyusha.apnawriter]

Hi @Adam Cao @Sam Bayley, 

Cancelled the individual annual membership accidentally. Neither could we access the power up nor did we receive the refund for the same.

We've reached out on the support mail, but in vain

Kindly help!!!

[Heather Hattersley]

Using many of the Tiny Power Ups in our organization.  Looking forward to the additional "tiny" power ups or features you may release.  So far I find many of these very useful.