How a powered-by badge brings in new users

Put a small branded link on what your users publish so their audience finds you.

Impact
High
Effort
Medium
Filed under
Referral, Awareness
Updated

A "powered by" badge is a small branded line or link that appears on something your customers publish or send with your product: a form, a booking page, a widget, an email footer. Everyone who sees that page is a possible new user. It suits tools whose output other people look at, such as form builders, schedulers, site builders and email tools. The usual model is to show the badge on the free plan and let paid plans remove it.

How to do it

  1. Find the surface strangers see. List what your users share with people outside your product: public pages, embedded widgets, emails, receipts, exported files. Pick the one that gets the most views from people who could become customers.
  2. Add a short line with a link. A name and a phrase that says what you do beat a logo alone. Link to a landing page for people who arrive from the badge, not your home page. Add a tracking parameter so you can count visits and signups from it.
  3. Make it removable on paid plans. This is how most tools handle it. Calendly lets customers on its Standard, Teams and Enterprise plans (and the legacy Professional plan) switch off the "Powered by Calendly" badge. Tally says removing its branding is a Tally Pro feature. Removal then becomes a reason to upgrade.
  4. Keep it small and out of the way. The badge sits below the content and does not change what the page's visitor came to do. A big or pushy badge gives your users a reason to hide it.
  5. Measure it. Compare signups from the badge link against the cost: how many free-plan users you keep happy, and how many upgrade to remove it.

Examples

  • Hotmail, 1996. Hotmail launched on July 4, 1996. TechCrunch's account says the founders added a tagline to outgoing mail after investor Tim Draper suggested "PS: I love you. Get your free e-mail at Hotmail" (the founders dropped the first half). TechCrunch reports growth of about 3,000 users a day after the tagline went in, and 1 million users within six months. The company was later sold to Microsoft in December 1997 for a reported $400 million (Wikipedia). There is no public breakdown of how much of that growth the tagline caused.
  • Calendly. Free scheduling pages carry a "Powered by Calendly" badge, and paid plans can turn it off from the Branding setting (Calendly help).
  • Tally. Tally branding on forms can be removed only on paid plans: "Removing Tally branding is a Tally Pro feature", and the change applies to all your forms (Tally help).

Limits and when it backfires

  • Links on many sites can count as link spam. Google's spam policies list "keyword-rich, hidden, or low-quality links embedded in widgets that are distributed across various sites" and "widely distributed links in the footers or templates of various sites". A cautious setup is your brand name as the anchor text and rel="nofollow" on the badge link. See the link spam section of Google's spam policies.
  • It annoys the customers who pay you. A badge on a client-facing page can look unprofessional. Consultants and agencies are the first to pay to remove it. Plan for that.
  • It does nothing without views. If your users' output is private or seen by few people, the badge earns little. A scheduling page sent to prospects does better than an internal form.
  • Your name is attached to your users' content. If someone builds a bad page with your tool, your badge sits on it. Decide what you will do about abuse.

Questions people ask

What does "powered by" mean on a website? It names the software or service the site runs on, like a form tool, store platform or booking system. The company behind it gets a link back.

Is "powered by" the same as "sponsored by"? No. "Powered by" credits the technology doing the work. "Sponsored by" credits someone who paid for it.

Sources

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