Why I don't build platforms

Blare, Cancely, and Devtools solve three problems that have nothing to do with each other — alerting, subscription tracking, and offline utilities. There's no unified dashboard connecting them, no bundled pricing tier, no cross-app account system. Every reasonable instinct in software says that's a missed opportunity. I keep not taking it, on purpose.

A platform is a promise you have to keep forever

The moment two products share an account system, they share a roadmap. A change to one now has to be evaluated against what it does to the other. A migration on one blocks a launch on the other. None of that is hypothetical — it's the default trajectory of every platform I've watched a small team build, and it's how a three-person shop ends up spending more time on internal plumbing than on the thing users actually asked for.

Staying separate means Blare can ship a redesign on a Tuesday without a single line of code in Cancely knowing it happened. That's not a limitation I'm working around — it's the entire reason three small apps built by one person can each stay genuinely maintained instead of slowly rotting under the weight of a platform none of them needed.

Narrow scope is a feature users can feel

An app that does one thing has a much shorter list of reasons to open it, and a much shorter list of things that can go wrong. Devtools doesn't need an account system because it doesn't sync anything. Cancely doesn't need a chat feature because tracking a renewal date doesn't require collaboration. Every feature I don't build is one less surface for a bug, one less setting to explain, one less reason the app feels heavier a year from now than it does today.

What does connect them

Not infrastructure — just a standard. Every one of these apps is built to run entirely on-device wherever possible, to ask for the minimum data it needs to function, and to stay useful without a subscription forcing continued engagement. That's a shared philosophy, not a shared codebase, and it's the only kind of connective tissue I want between them.