A card that can't get stuck in a drawer

Why it exists

Because the paper card always goes the same way. It appears on a desk on a Tuesday. It reaches the four people sitting nearest. Half the team is at home, one is on holiday, and the person hiding it in their drawer has taken it to a conference in Birmingham. It arrives an hour late with a biro line down one corner where somebody tested the pen.

A link does none of that. It goes in the group chat, everyone signs it in twenty seconds, and nobody has to smuggle anything past the recipient's desk while making eye contact with them.

So it's Kudoboard, then?

Broadly, yes — a shared board of messages for someone who deserves one. Kudoboard is the big, established one and there's nothing wrong with it. This is the small one, built with a few stubborn opinions: nobody signs up, not even you; the price is £5 once rather than a plan you forget you're on; and the whole board prints as a PDF, because a card you can't keep is just a webpage.

Like Kudoboard but better, probably. The first three messages are free, so settling that costs you nothing.

Who made it

Applaudy is built by Knitted Mice, a very small independent studio — the sort where the developer, the designer and the support desk are the same person, and that person also makes the tea.

It's written in the evenings, runs at the edge because a server sitting idle all week is an expensive way to feel important, and it's funded entirely by the occasional £5. That is the business model in full. There are no investors to keep happy, which is why nothing here is trying to talk you into a monthly plan.

Things it deliberately doesn't do

• Accounts. Not for you, not for the signers, not for the recipient. Nobody should need a password to say happy birthday.
• Adverts. A leaving card shouldn't carry a banner for car insurance.
• Subscriptions. £5 is a one-off, for one board. It never renews, so there's nothing to cancel and nothing to resent in eleven months.
• Selling your data. We keep the board and very little else, and would happily keep less. The privacy page is the short, boring proof.
• Engagement. The best outcome here is that you use it twice a year and think about us the rest of the time not at all.

Say hello

Questions, bugs, feature requests, strong feelings about em dashes: hello@applaudyboard.com. It reaches a real inbox read by a real person, usually the same day. Tell us what you were trying to do and we'll sort it out.

If something's gone wrong with a board, send the link as well. We can't look boards up by name, which is deliberate, and occasionally inconvenient for exactly this reason.