Your phone is powerful enough to run Good Company entirely on-device — no server, no subscription, bought once like a real tool.
Over the last several years, I stopped using social media. Pretty much completely. I had started feeling like the platforms weren't helping me stay in touch with my friends anymore. It was increasingly difficult to hear any signal through the noise of unwanted posts from people I barely knew. But getting off of social media left me with no signal, and no noise, just silence.
So I wanted to come up with a way to maximize the signal.
At the beginning of the mobile world, storage was at a premium. As phones have changed and grown, we don't need to store data elsewhere. There's no need to wait for the content to load from a server, it's right there, on your device for you to use anywhere and everywhere. We've seen so many times in the past couple years a backbone of the internet go down and you can't use anything. So when your data is on your phone, it's faster — and you don't have to worry about a connection.
A decade ago, mobile computing was underpowered for a lot of processes. It made sense to offload most of our computations to a large remote server. Today, mobile processors are so powerful we can run almost anything locally. That power enables your entire life's relationships to live on your phone, privately. The increased power on all of our phones has removed the need for servers across a wide variety of apps but the model hasn't shifted.
The old model of everything needing subscription has become a business choice. There are certain things that need servers and backend infrastructure to deliver their product (Netflix cannot stream movies without servers) but then there are apps like calculators that have subscriptions! Calculators have existed in various forms for several millennia but there's no reason a calculator should need a subscription. Our phones have the storage and the power to not need a server for every app. We live in an era where subscription fatigue is real. Every month, we look at our budgets and go "why are my subscriptions so much?" and the real answer is a tired business model that doesn't want to update to the power of your phone.
That's why I built Good Company to be an on-device app — I didn't need a server. That's why I only charge once for the app — there's no server to keep running.
Your phone is a supercomputer in your pocket, your tools should be like the ones in your garage, a one time purchase.