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Most software companies publish what they decided. These are the reasons — including the decisions that cost us something, and the ones we would rather you heard from us.
If you have paid for time you are not using, there is a button that gives it back. No window, no reason, no email to support. Here is exactly how the number is worked out, and where we round.
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Seven desktop applications, our own document engine, and the Outlook archive formats almost nothing else opens. Free under the AGPL, no account, no telemetry — and a commercial reason it is not charity.
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Software is full of places where the arithmetic is not exact. Each one is a decision about who absorbs the fraction, and we made that decision once, in advance, for all of them.
When two systems can both price the same thing, eventually both of them do. Here is the single rule we hold to instead, and the one line of SQL that enforces it.
The strongest privacy claim software can make is not a policy — it is that you can pull the cable and nothing breaks. Here is what that takes, and the one exception we will not pretend does not exist.
Pipeline stages are the easy half of a CRM and every product has them. The half that decides whether anyone can answer the phone is whether the quote, the ticket, the invoice and the call are on the same row.
A till sale, a pay run and a stock revaluation are all journal entries that somebody currently types twice. We made each of them post its own, and what is left is the work actually worth doing.
The argument always starts the same way: two systems each keeping their own copy. The fix is not better syncing. It is deciding, once, which one is allowed to hold the number.
What decides a dispute two years later is whether you can still show what happened: who opened it, from where, what they accepted, in what order, and that not one byte has moved since. That record is the product.
Not in the employee record and not in the pay calculation — in the gap between them, where somebody types hours from one system into another. We removed the gap, and left the biometrics out on purpose.
Which is worth exactly as much as your relationship with that vendor. Ours returns a record anyone can check independently — from a public endpoint, with no key, that does not reach your systems at all.
So that place should not be three separate queues. Web, counter and phone orders are the same object the moment they exist — which is the decision that makes a picking list, a driver app and a return all work the same way.
Most production planning goes wrong in the gap between them. An MRP run that reads today’s stock, plans against a pinned bill version, and hands the dispatch list to the bench closes that gap — and works offline when the bench has no signal.
Running a site on one system and a till on another means two product lists, two price changes, and a stock number that is wrong in at least one place. Web and counter are two channels of one business, so we built them that way.
Bounces, complaints and the slow drift into spam folders are a reputation problem, and reputation is a property of your domain rather than of any one product. So transactional mail and campaigns go out through the same relay.
The HR list of issued kit, the fixed-asset register in accounting, and whatever the plant keeps for machines. They describe the same laptops and the same machines, and the auditor asks all three.
That is the commodity half. The half worth building is an inbox that knows your business — a message from a customer showing their orders, their tickets and their balance beside it, and filing against the deal in one click.
The export was correct on the morning somebody ran it. Then stock moved, invoices were paid, and the file kept looking authoritative. Binding a cell to live data is a smaller idea than it sounds, and it fixes the whole class.
The scheduling half is well served. The part that is not: a documented API the console itself is built on, so anything else — including an assistant with the same permissions a person has — can publish the same way.
Six months later, the reason you discounted that order is in a channel, ninety messages up, phrased in a way nobody would search for. Some conversations belong in a channel. That one belongs on the order.
It is also how storage bills grow. Keep one master and generate whatever dimensions are asked for at request time, and a redesign that changes every image size costs a URL change rather than a re-upload.
A prospect and a ten-year client get identical copy, because the segment was built from a CSV somebody exported in March. Segments from live records are not a nicer feature. They are a different product.
Cloud camera services charge monthly to store your footage on someone else’s disk, and stop working the moment the line drops. Rutba Vision runs on a box in your building. The only thing that talks to us is a licence check.
Rooms, lobby, breakouts, polls, whiteboard, attendance reports — built and tested. The media server all of it talks to is not deployed, so the product is listed as coming soon. Also: why we refuse end-to-end encryption.
The ad is not wrong when it is made. It becomes wrong on the Tuesday somebody edits the catalogue, and nothing about the file says so. Binding a design to live product data is the same trick as a live spreadsheet cell, pointed at an ad.
So we built the record-keeping half first and the telephony second. That is backwards from how phone systems are usually built, and it means you cannot buy this yet — but the half that exists is the half that was missing.
Folders, versions, sharing, quotas and a published SDK all work today — as the layer underneath Rutba Docs. The standalone interface is not built, so the product is marked coming soon rather than early access.
Most partner programmes offer a territory that three other partners are already working. Ours has eleven regions and none of them is spoken for — which is a statement about how early we are, not how generous.
What is due, what is off the road, what did fuel cost per kilometre. Those are asset questions, so the vehicle goes on the asset register rather than in a fleet system’s own copy of it. This one is not built yet, and here is the design anyway.
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