Principles

What I hold to.

Six rules the apps are held to, written specifically enough that they could be broken — a principle nobody has ever had to obey is a slogan. The story of why any of this exists is on the About page.

One job, done properly.

An app should be explainable in a sentence. If it needs a tour, a tutorial, or an onboarding flow, it has stopped being a tool and started being a product. I would rather ship something small that works than something broad that mostly works.

Your data goes somewhere you already own.

Not my servers, because there are none. Your journal syncs through your iCloud. Your step count goes to the Home Assistant already running in your house. This is the constraint everything else follows from — you cannot lose, leak, or sell what you never held.

No accounts, no subscriptions, no ads.

Every one of those exists to make leaving expensive. An account so I can count you, a subscription so you keep paying after the app stops being useful, ads so your attention pays the bill. Free to download and free to keep means you can walk away and nothing breaks.

If I can’t say where your data goes in one line, it isn’t finished.

There is a table on the homepage with one row per app and a plain-language destination for each. It is a real constraint, not a marketing page: an app that cannot fill in that line honestly does not ship. Vagueness in that column is a design failure.

While everyone else builds AI slop and charges for it, I build AI slop that’s free to anyone :)

Said with a smile, but there is a real point underneath. These apps were built fast, by one person, with modern tools doing a lot of the typing. That is not a secret and it is not an apology — it is the reason they can cost nothing. What I won’t do is use that speed as an excuse to charge a monthly fee for something that took a weekend.

I use everything I build.

Each app here started as something I wanted and couldn’t find, and I still use every one of them daily. It is the cheapest quality control there is: nothing survives that is annoying to live with.

If any of this turns out to be untrue in practice, that is worth knowing about — help@plainandsimple.app.