Capitalism Killed Software.
A small business in 2025 pays roughly four hundred dollars a month for software that, fifteen years ago, would have cost a one-time licence fee of perhaps eighty dollars and would have kept working until the hardware died. The tools haven't gotten better. The needs haven't gotten more complex. The relationship between the user and the software has been restructured so that the user is now a perpetual tenant, paying rent on the right to access work they did themselves.
This restructuring was sold as access. As convenience. As the future. What it actually was, was the conversion of an asset the user owned into a service the user rented from someone else, with all of the dependence and none of the leverage. The software did not change much. The contract underneath it changed entirely.
This is what we mean when we say software was killed. Not that it stopped being made. That the version still being made stopped serving the people using it.
A piece of software is either yours or it isn't. There is no middle position. Either you can run it without the permission of a third party, modify it to suit your needs, keep using it after the company that made it goes away, and take your data with you when you leave — or you can't. The industry has spent twenty years blurring this line, marketing access as ownership, marketing convenience as control. The line hasn't actually moved. It's just been hidden.
We start from the un-hidden version. The people we build for own the software they use. They own their data. They own the right to leave without losing what they've made. They own the right to be told the truth about what the software is doing. None of this is radical. All of it used to be the default. It became unusual only because an industry found it more profitable to take these things back, one feature at a time, and call it progress.
The position we work from is that those things should be returned. Not as charity, not as a marketing differentiator, but as the baseline below which it isn't worth calling something software at all.
Most of the work involves undoing arrangements someone else made for our clients without asking, and replacing them with arrangements the client actually wants.
We help people leave software that's stopped serving them. We help them migrate off SaaS that has become unaffordable, untrustworthy, or simply unnecessary. We help them set up the parts of their work — payments, customer records, calendars, files — on infrastructure they actually control. We help them learn to use the AI tools that are reshaping their industries without giving up their data to do it. We help them understand the devices in their pockets and the operating systems on their laptops well enough to make those devices serve them rather than report on them.
We don't sell the work as transformation. We sell it as restoration. The thing we are restoring is the relationship between the people doing the work and the tools they do it with.
Most engagements start with a phone call that lasts about half an hour. The client describes what they're trying to do. We listen and ask questions. By the end of the call, we usually know whether we can help, and whether we should. If we can and we should, we send a written scope and a price within two working days. If we can't, we say so, and we usually know who can. We do not pitch. We do not follow up. The decision belongs to the person who called.
Once the work begins, we keep contact light. Most clients hear from us when there's something to show, something to decide, or something to flag. We do not generate status reports as a substitute for progress. We assume the client has other work to do and does not need to be reassured that we are also working.
When the engagement ends, it ends. We do not retain access. We do not keep credentials. We hand over what we built, what it depends on, and how to maintain it, and then we stop being involved unless the client asks us back.
If you found this page, you probably already know something is wrong.
You may run a business and have watched your software costs climb every year while the products themselves got worse. You may run a larger organization and have noticed how much of your operational sovereignty has quietly been transferred to a handful of vendors who can change the terms whenever they choose. You may have built a company and be deciding what its first hundred technical decisions will be, and want them to be ones you won't regret. You may be a person with the resources to choose any tools you want and be tired of finding that the best-marketed ones are the ones most aggressively designed against you.
What unites the people we work with is not a budget or a sector or a stage. It is the recognition that the people currently shaping the future of software are not the people who should be shaping it, and that continuing to defer to them is a choice with costs that compound. The work we do exists for people who have made that recognition and are looking for a different way to operate.
If that's the conversation you came to have, we're ready to have it.
The software industry will not reform itself. The companies extracting value from the current arrangement will keep extracting until the arrangement collapses or until enough of their customers leave. Reform is not on the table. Departure is. What we do is help people leave, and help them set up something better in the place they are leaving for.
If you have read this far, you are already most of the way there. The rest is logistics.