Manifesto
Fixing Humanity
We make simple apps. That is the whole idea.
Software used to be a tool you bought, and it did its job. Somewhere along the way it became a machine for extracting money: subscriptions for things that cost nothing to provide, “free” apps with a paywall behind the first screen, hidden fees, upsells engineered to make you feel you need more, and your data quietly sold to whoever pays. We don’t want any of that.
What we believe
One price, everything included. You pay once and the app is yours, with every feature, forever. If something costs us money to run for you — sending email from our servers, storing your photos — we charge for that and only that, at a fair price, with no limits and no tricks. Everything else is included.
Nothing hidden. The price is on the button before you download. There are no fees you discover later, no dark patterns, no countdown timers, no “limited offers”. If a feature is optional and costs money, we say so up front, in plain words.
We don’t manufacture wants. We will never design a screen to make you feel that you need more. The app does its job and gets out of the way. That’s the product.
Your data is yours. It lives on your device and in your own iCloud. We don’t have an account for you, we don’t see your invoices or your readings, and we don’t sell, share or analyse anything about you. We can’t — it never reaches us.
Simple beats complete. Each app does one job, directly, in as few taps as possible. We would rather leave a feature out than make the app harder to understand.
Where the money comes from
We are a business and we charge for our work. The difference is where the money comes from: it comes from making something useful and charging a fair price for it — never from exploiting a customer’s weakness. Not from confusion, not from habit, not from the fear of losing access, not from a moment of impulse. If the only way to earn more is to take advantage of the person using the app, we don’t want that money.
We don’t have shareholders to satisfy or growth targets to hit, so nothing pushes us to squeeze. Customers who find our apps useful and feel fairly treated are the whole business — the way it used to be.
— Manuel, Fixing Humanity