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.

Subscription Fatigue

Add up every subscription you pay for. Go ahead. Streaming services, cloud storage, productivity tools, budgeting apps, note-taking apps, password managers, email providers, VPNs. The average household now spends hundreds of dollars a month on software they will never own.

"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.

The Data Trust Problem

Every time you hand your financial data to a cloud-based budgeting 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 decided to eliminate the need for it entirely. When your data never leaves your device, there is nothing to breach, nothing to sell, and nothing to lose.

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

The Stillware Pledge

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. That's the way it should be.

The Four Rules of Stillware