The Stillware
Manifesto

The Death of Software Ownership

There was a time when you bought software and it was yours. You installed it, you used it, and it worked whether or not the company that made it still existed. That era is dying.

Today, the industry has decided that you don't deserve to own the tools you depend on. Instead, you rent them. Month after month. Year after year. And the moment you stop paying, everything disappears — your data, your workflows, your muscle memory. Gone.

We think that's wrong.

Where Subscriptions Went Wrong

Add up every subscription you pay for. Streaming services, cloud storage, productivity tools, budgeting apps, note-taking apps, password managers, email providers, VPNs.

Some of those are honest. Streaming pays for licenses and bandwidth. Cloud storage pays for disks someone has to keep spinning. Real ongoing cost, real ongoing service, real ongoing fee. Fair enough.

But a budgeting app? A note-taking app? A password manager? Software that lives on your device, stores data on your device, and depends on no remote infrastructure to function? Charging you forever for that isn't a service fee. It's rent extraction. You're not paying for ongoing work. You're paying so they don't take it away.

"You are not a customer. You are a recurring revenue metric on someone else's growth chart."

For a personal finance app — a tool whose entire purpose is to help you spend less money — charging a monthly subscription is not just ironic. It's insulting.

When Subscriptions Are Honest

We don't pretend every subscription is theft. The test is simple: if you stop paying, what actually stops working?

If the answer is "a tool sitting on my hard drive" — that's rent extraction.

If the answer is "the servers, the phone numbers, the AI models, and the people running them on my behalf" — that's a service. Services cost money to run, every month, forever, and pretending otherwise is dishonest pricing.

So here is our rule:

Stillware apps are pay-once. They run on your device. They store data on your device. They don't need us to keep working. Zeroed. RankUp Chess.

And if we ever ship something with real ongoing cost — servers, AI inference, infrastructure we run on your behalf — it will be priced as what it is: an optional, monthly, cancel-anytime service, never a toll on software sitting on your hard drive. The app you bought will always work fully without it.

Same ethic either way. We charge for what we actually do — never for sitting on your hard drive.

The Data Trust Problem

Every time you hand your financial data, your home inventory, or your private journal to a cloud-based app, you are trusting that:

• Their servers won't be breached.
• Their employees won't misuse your information.
• Their investors won't pressure them to monetize your data.
• The company itself won't go bankrupt and leave your data in limbo.

That's a lot of trust to place in a startup. We eliminated the need for it entirely. When your data never leaves your device, there is nothing to breach, nothing to sell, and nothing to lose.

The Stillware Pledges

"If Stillware Ltd goes out of business tomorrow, every app you bought from us will continue to work perfectly on your device."

This is not a marketing slogan. It is a direct consequence of how we build software. Our apps are local-first. They run on your device. They store data on your device. They sync through your own cloud storage — Google Drive, iCloud — not through our servers.

We have no database of your information. We have no server infrastructure that, if shut down, would render your purchase useless. Your license lives in your own cloud storage as a verification file. Your data lives in your own encrypted database. If we vanish, your software keeps running.

The Four Rules of Stillware