Software is dead: a manifesto
For twenty years, the software industry ran on a simple trick: take something that costs nothing to copy — bits — and charge you for it every month, forever.
They don't charge you for what software costs to make. They charge you because they can. Because your company is already inside. Because migrating hurts. Because the first one set the price and everyone else copied it.
The math doesn't add up (for them)
Look at it closely. A project manager charges about $30 per user per month to move cards from one column to another. A CRM charges $50 to store contacts in a table. A link shortener charges $12 for a 300-byte redirect.
The marginal cost of all of that is, literally, zero. A database, a $5 server, bandwidth measured in cents.
Software is bits. And bits are free. They always were.
What happened to music, but in reverse
The music industry lost the battle against zero marginal cost and reinvented itself with streaming. The software industry, instead, spent twenty years convincing us that bits were scarce.
That's over. Artificial intelligence pushed the cost of writing software to nearly zero. What remains — the cost of running it — is the cloud. And the cloud has a public price.
The model we propose
Zerosoftware rebuilds the tools that move the world and sets them free:
- All the code is open. Download it, audit it, modify it, host it. It's yours.
- If you don't want to host it, we run it for you. With login, backups, updates and uptime. You pay exactly what the cloud costs. At cost. Not a penny more. Not a penny less.
No per-seat licenses. No lock-in. No fine print. If we ever get it wrong, you take your data and your entire software somewhere else. That's the best guarantee there is.
What's next
We're starting with Link, our link shortener with analytics — the Bitly that doesn't charge. Then come Track, CRM and Cal. And then, everything else: docs, notes, chat, design. If the world uses it, we will set it free.
Software is dead. We are what comes next.
Welcome to the new world.