Manifesto
Every tool your group has tried got worse by getting bigger.
Discord was a clean voice app before it became a platform. Slack was fast before it became an operating system. Group chat was simple before your group needed it to be more. TinyHubs is built on one bet: a tool for small groups stays good by refusing to grow.
What TinyHubs is
Four things, done properly, for groups of roughly 10–50 with something to organize: chat for talking, files that stay findable, events and polls that turn plans and decisions into records, and forms that collect what the organizer is on the hook to collect — each with a list of who hasn’t answered, so the chasing isn’t a person’s job anymore.
And deliberately nothing else. Here is the nothing else, in writing, so you can hold us to it.
What we refuse, and why
No ads, no tracking, no content mining
Your group includes kids, arguments, medical forms, and votes about money. Advertising business models point software at exactly that material. We charge a flat price instead, so the customer and the user are the same people. The privacy pitch survives a network-tab inspection — this site itself carries no third-party trackers.
No per-user pricing, ever
Per-seat pricing charges a group for growing, which is the one thing a group is supposed to do. It also structurally forces feature bloat: every seat sold must be justified with more product. One hub, one price. Inviting person 21 costs nothing.
No engagement mechanics
No streaks, badges, read receipts, algorithmic feeds, or “you haven’t posted in a while.” TinyHubs is not trying to increase your time in the app. It’s trying to help your group get something done and get out.
No bots, plugins, or integrations marketplace
A plugin surface is the mechanism by which every competitor became a maze — an open invitation for others to add complexity to your product on your behalf. There is no TinyHubs app store, and there never will be.
No AI features
No summarizer, no assistant, no “smart” anything. If a real, repeatedly-observed group pain someday demands one, we’ll argue it out loud in the changelog first. The default answer is no.
No public communities
Hubs are for known groups with a door. Public discovery brings spam, moderation, and trust-and-safety machinery that changes what a product is. If you're building an audience, you want a different tool.
No enterprise features
No SSO, no compliance exports, no audit-log dashboards, no admin consoles with role matrices. Their absence is a filter, not an oversight: they are how workplace software finds its way into a scout troop, and we’d rather it didn’t.
The feature budget
Every feature has a cost, paid by every user on every screen, forever. So feature requests here are resolved by a checklist, and a “no” at any step ends it:
- Does the organizer of a 10–50 person group feel this pain monthly?
- Can it be an object — a thing with a record — rather than a notification?
- Can it ship without a new role, permission concept, or integration?
- Can a volunteer coach use it without being taught?
- What are we removing to pay for it?
If a feature requires explaining a concept your group didn’t already have — threads, workflows, workspaces — it doesn’t ship.
Two promises that make the rest credible
Your data leaves with you. Files as a zip, everything else as CSV/JSON, any time, no exit interview. A tool for volunteer groups has to be easier to leave than a group chat, or the trust never arrives. How export works.
The hub outlives the organizer. Committees turn over every September. The hub belongs to the group — rights transfer, the record stays, and next year’s chair inherits an institution instead of a shoebox of logins.