Software made in good faith.
Useful tools. Honest pricing. No extraction.
Sincereware is software designed as a useful tool, funded honestly, and respectful of the user's attention, privacy, and agency. Not a certification, not a directory — a standard you can check against a product.
A tool, not a trap.
Useful and restrained
Make a clear thing that does what it promises. Complexity added to manufacture dependency is a defect, not a roadmap.
Users are not inventory
No advertising or surveillance as the business model. Attention and behaviour are not the product being sold.
Honest payment
Paying is fine when it funds real value or real ongoing cost. The objection is extraction, not revenue.
No unjustified subscriptions
Recurring payment needs recurring value, service, or cost. What you bought once stays yours when you stop paying.
Agency, including the exit
Clear pricing, clear limits, accessible data, and a real ability to leave without your work being held hostage.
No behavioural coercion
No manufactured urgency, streak anxiety, false scarcity, or notification loops that exist mainly to retain people.
Growth shared with users
Where a product runs on recurring support, scale should lower the burden on the people who created that scale.
Inspectable claims
Every commitment above has to be checkable in the product itself. That is what the receipt is for.
What Sincereware is not.
- — Not "everything must be free." Software that cannot survive is not automatically ethical.
- — Not anti-business. A good product can charge fairly and profitably.
- — Not a badge, a scheme, or a certification. Nobody audits anybody here.
- — Not a promise that every product will have a Community Rate.
- — Not a movement, yet. One product practises this properly. That is the honest count.
The Community Rate.
A feature costs money to run and improve. As more people support it, the price falls — for everyone, including the people who joined first.
Reductions apply to everyone
When a threshold is genuinely met, existing subscribers drop to the new price automatically. No re-signing, no loyalty penalty.
Collective, not referral bait
No "invite ten friends for free access." The benefit is shared and gradual, or it isn't offered.
No promise that prices never rise
Prices fall as scale allows. If costs materially change, that gets explained before anything changes.
Only for real ongoing cost
One-time purchases stay owned. A recurring price is only for something with recurring value or expense behind it.
Status: proposed. No product currently runs a Community Rate, and no membership numbers are published here because there are none to publish.
The Sincereware Receipt.
Six lines, published by the product itself. It is what makes the ethic checkable instead of decorative: anyone can compare the receipt to what the software actually does.
- Free
- the core capability that stays genuinely useful
- Paid
- specific features, services, or ongoing costs
- Data
- what is collected, in plain language
- Never sold
- data, attention, behavioural profiles
- Leaving
- export, deletion, and what stays yours
- Growth
- what changes for users as the product scales
Why six lines
A privacy policy is written to be survivable in court. A receipt is written to be read in thirty seconds by the person paying. The constraint is the point: if a line cannot be answered plainly, the product has a decision left to make, not a wording problem.
It sits in the product — settings, pricing page, or about screen — not only on a marketing site. Claims belong next to the thing they describe.
A habit tracker built around returning, not perfection.
Most habit apps are built on loss aversion: a streak you can break, and an app that makes sure you feel it. Consistently is built the other way around. Missing a day is ordinary. The design question is what makes returning easy, not what makes leaving painful.
So there is no punitive language and no reward architecture engineered to keep you opening the app. Past records can be corrected rather than silently rewritten, and your history is preserved rather than trimmed to whatever the current plan allows. It works offline, and syncs when you want it to.
The core of the app is free and stays useful on its own. Anything bought once is owned — it does not disappear if you later stop paying for anything else. The full receipt gets published with the product's pricing, not ahead of it.
Visit ConsistentlyTake the language, if it fits.
There is nothing to apply for and nobody to approve you. If the words here describe decisions you already make, use them — and publish your own receipt so people can check.
That is the whole ask. A standard nobody polices is worth more than a badge somebody sells.
Treating users like human beings is a competitive advantage.
Software can be profitable without becoming extractive.
We make tools, not traps.
Decisions, written down.
The argument gets made through specific product decisions rather than ideology. These are the ones queued to be written. None are published yet — listed here so the intent is on the record.
- 001Why this feature is freeUnwritten
- 002What this subscription actually pays forUnwritten
- 003Why purchases stay yoursUnwritten
- 004Why Consistently does not punish missed daysUnwritten
- 005When more people support a tool, why should they all pay less?Unwritten
Build something worth keeping.