Principles

Own your tools. Bring your AI. Keep your data.

Six commitments, each with the thing it rules out written next to it. A principle that costs nothing to hold is not a principle, so the refusals are the part worth reading.

Commitments

What is promised, and what it costs to promise it.

  • Local-first whenever it is technically possible

    Your files, your keys, your recordings and your vault live on your disk. Where a job genuinely needs the network — a model call, a deploy to your own server — the app says so before it goes.

    Rules outA cloud account you must have in order to open the app.

  • Bring your own AI provider, or your own model

    Point the apps at Claude, OpenAI, Gemini, Kimi or something running on the machine next to you. We never resell tokens, which means we never have a reason to make you use more of them.

    Rules outCredits, included usage, and a house model you did not choose.

  • You buy the software once

    A licence is a purchase, not a lease. Twelve months of updates are included; declining to renew costs you nothing and takes nothing away.

    Rules outA subscription for software that runs entirely on your own computer.

  • Major upgrades are optional, never forced

    When a product changes enough to warrant a new major version, it is a separate decision you can decline while carrying on with what you already have.

    Rules outMigrations that happen to you rather than because of you.

  • Focused products, connected by a shared foundation

    Each product owns one discipline and then stops. Memory, execution, voice and agents are shared underneath, so cooperation does not require any single app to grow into a suite.

    Rules outFeature creep justified by the price of the bundle.

  • Consequential agent actions wait for a human

    Agents read widely and write freely inside a sandbox. Deleting, deploying, publishing and spending stop and ask, with the change shown before it happens.

    Rules outAutonomy that is really just an unlogged action you did not authorise.

On the name

Why a Stoic name for a software company.

The Stoics were not interested in austerity for its own sake. They were interested in spending attention on the things that respond to it, and refusing to spend it on the things that do not. That turns out to be a software design brief.

Almost every tool in this category asks for attention it has not earned: an account to create, a dashboard to check, a plan to reconsider every quarter, a migration to survive, a model you did not pick. Each one is small. Together they are most of the reason running a one-person company feels like administering one.

So the discipline here is subtractive. Every product is asked what it would have to stop doing to be worth opening at eleven at night, and the answer is usually most of what a product manager would add. That is the whole philosophy, and it takes about this much space — which is the point. The customer outcome should occupy more of a website than the founder’s reading list.

How buying works

Buy the tool. Keep the tool.

The whole model fits in six sentences, so here are all six rather than a link to a terms page.

The licensed version works indefinitely
If you stop paying attention to us entirely, the version you bought keeps opening. There is no server that can switch it off and no login that can expire.
Twelve months of updates are included
Every paid app ships updates for a year from purchase. Renewing extends that window; not renewing costs you nothing and takes nothing away.
Major upgrades are optional
When a product changes enough to warrant a new major version, it is a separate purchase you can decline. Nobody is migrated against their will.
AI costs are yours and stay separate
You bring a Claude, OpenAI, Gemini or Kimi key, or point the apps at a local model. We never resell tokens, so we never mark them up.
Hosting and domains are yours too
Server Compass manages servers you rent from Hetzner, DigitalOcean or anyone else. That bill is between you and them.
Devices are counted, not seats
A licence covers 1, 3 or 5 machines. Adding devices later costs the difference rather than a fresh licence.

Every price, bundle and cost breakdown

Why twelve

Every product started as a job I was already doing badly by hand.

None of this began as a portfolio strategy. It began with a one-person company that kept hitting the same wall: the tools that would have helped were rented, cloud-bound, and priced for a team that did not exist.

Server Compass came first, because deploying to a VPS by hand at midnight stopped being funny. 1FileTool came from refusing to upload client documents to a website in order to merge two PDFs. 1DevTool came from running four coding agents in four terminals and losing all of their context every time the laptop slept. 1AIVault came from explaining the same architectural decision to a fresh model for the fourth time in a month.

The pattern held: build the thing you are already doing by hand, ship it, then use it hard enough to find out where it is wrong. Everything on this site is written, deployed, marketed and supported using the products on this site. When one of them is annoying, I am the first person it annoys.

Not all of it worked. Write.Rocks was a genuinely good blogging platform in a market that already had ten good blogging platforms, and it taught the rule the rest of the catalogue follows. Three more — 1SessionTool, 1AgentBox and 1AIControl — were shipped as separate products before it became obvious they were features. They now live inside 1DevTool and 1VMTool, where they should have started.

Twelve is not a target. It is the number of distinct jobs a one-person software company turned out to have.

One person can build a company.Their software should help them run it.

Start with 1DevToolCompare all twelveSee pricing and bundles

Free tiers on most apps. Seven-day refund on every paid one. No account needed to try anything.