How we build
Decisions with a reason attached, including the ones that cost us something. Most software companies publish the outcome; this is the argument.
· 4 min read
Ask for your money back, any time, and we will not ask why
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.
· 4 min read
We wrote an office suite and gave it away
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.
· 3 min read
Every rounding goes to the customer
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.
· 3 min read
One unit, one rater: the rule that stops us billing you twice
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.
· 3 min read
The CRM is not the pipeline. It is the record everything else hangs off
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.
· 3 min read
Stock is the number a business argues about most
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.
· 4 min read
Anyone can put a picture of a signature on a page
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.
· 3 min read
Every signature API returns an audit report the vendor vouches for
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.
· 4 min read
The plan, the stockroom and the floor should not be three systems
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.
· 3 min read
Nobody notices email deliverability until sales drop
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.
· 3 min read
Most companies have three asset registers and none of them agree
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.
· 3 min read
We built the whole meeting and you still cannot buy it
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.
· 2 min read
Phone calls are where the business happens and the least gets recorded
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.
· 2 min read
Rutba Drive is running. There is just nowhere to visit it
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.
· 2 min read
Exclusivity is genuinely available, because nobody holds it yet
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.
· 2 min read
A fleet manager’s questions are compliance and cost, not today’s parcels
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.
