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 Stillware is two things, side by side:

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. RankUpChess. Estate Keep. Fort Knox Diary.

Stillware Services are monthly, cancel-anytime. We operate the infrastructure — phone numbers, inference, orchestration, and the on-call when something breaks at 6pm on a Tuesday. NeverMiss is the first one. More are coming.

Same ethic, two pricing models. 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. For our Apps, 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.

For our Services, where we operate infrastructure on your behalf, we minimise what we hold and how long we hold it. We do not sell, share, or train models on your operational data. You can export everything at any time. If you cancel, we wind down within 30 days.

The Stillware Pledges

For our Apps:

"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.

For our Services:

"If we ever shut down a service, you get 90 days' notice, a full data export, and a list of comparable alternatives."

Operating infrastructure means we are responsible for uptime, security, and continuity. We take that seriously. No surprise terminations. No hostage data. No "we're shutting down on December 31st, sorry." If a service goes away, you get out cleanly.

The Four Rules of Stillware