Ten years and you still laugh at my worst jokes. Thank you, boss.
Deniz
About Noya
A free online group card. One person starts it, everybody writes on it, and it becomes one page you send.
What it is
Noya is a group card. One person starts one for somebody, sends the link to everybody who would want to say something, and each of them leaves a note on it. What arrives at the end is a single page with all of it on it.
Birthdays are the obvious use and not the only one. A leaving day, a thank you, a get well soon and a sorry for your loss are the same object underneath: a lot of people with something short to say to one person, and no good way to say it together.
It is free, it reads in 34 languages, and it picks yours from your browser rather than asking you to find it in a menu.
Why it exists
Making a group card is something most people do two or three times a year. It is a small job, it is worth doing properly, and the software around it is usually heavier than the thing itself.
So Noya starts with nothing. Opening the editor creates no card, no account and no record anywhere: what you are writing lives in your own browser and saves itself there as you type, so a closed tab costs you nothing and a card you abandon never existed. You write the thing first and decide whether to keep it afterwards.
How it works
Start it
Opening the editor creates nothing. The card is held in your browser and saved there as you go, so a refresh or a closed tab costs you nothing and coming back offers to carry on where you stopped.
Save it
Saving is what gives the card a link and puts it in your account, and it is the point where you sign in. It is the only point: writing on somebody else's card needs no account at all.
Share it
Send the link, show the QR code, or put the card inside a page of your own. Notes arrive as people write them, and you hand the card over when it is full.
What goes on a note
Words
Up to 2,000 characters, in one of five faces. Each of them sizes itself to the length of what you wrote, so four words and four sentences both land looking deliberate.
Pictures and video
Photos, GIFs and video, up to six things on one note. A video note can be recorded in the page itself, front camera or back, up to a minute long.
Voice
A voice note, up to two minutes, recorded in the page. Its waveform is measured from the audio rather than drawn to look busy, and when the shape cannot be measured the player says so by staying flat.
Paper
Six colours, laid over the card's own scene at a third of their strength, so a page of notes reads as paper rather than as a row of coloured boxes.
A name, if you want
A note can be signed or left unsigned. Hearts are counted and never named, so nobody has to be seen to have liked something.
File sizes
8 MB a photo, 12 MB a GIF or a voice note, 50 MB a video. Those are the only limits in the product, and they are technical rather than commercial.
And the card underneath
The card the notes sit on is a moving scene, of which there are two, and it can carry music: fifteen royalty free tracks in three moods, silent unless somebody chooses one. The title takes the same five faces the notes do.
When the person it is for opens the link, they get an opening screen first. It exists so that nothing starts playing in a quiet office before they have had the chance to decide.
What it costs
Nothing. There is no paid plan, no trial and no card to enter, no cap on how many cards you make or how many notes go on one, and no payment code in the product at all. The file sizes above are the only ceilings in it.
What it doesn't do
Some of that is on purpose.
- There is no advertising, and no third party analytics. Nothing on the page reports back to anybody.
- Two cookies: the language you read in, and a hint that lets a page paint the right header before it has finished asking who you are.
- A note carries no account id, so a card is not a readable list of who knows whom.
- Deleting your account is a button that deletes it, not a message you send and wait on.
And some of it is simply not built.
- Noya sends no email at all. No invitations, no reminders, and no notification when a note arrives. The link is the whole mechanism.
- There is no export. No PDF, no slideshow, and no way to download a card as a file.
- A card does not update while you are looking at it. Notes written by other people appear when the page is reloaded.
- Anybody holding the link can read the card and add to it. There are no passwords on cards and no links that expire, which is worth knowing before you send one to twelve people.
Who makes it
Noya is built and run by a small independent team. There is no company behind it selling anything on the side, which is most of the answer to why the list above is shaped the way it is.
If something is broken, or missing, or you want to argue with a decision on this page, the contact page reaches a person.