Ethics
What we will not do, and what it costs
Positions are cheap when they cost nothing. Each of these gives something up — a feature, a revenue line, or work we could have taken. That is the only reason they are worth publishing.
Where a model earns its place, and where it does not
A model gets added when it does a job that needs doing, and not otherwise. Crub runs one because naming a plant from a photograph is a thing models are genuinely good at. KinopiQ runs one because working out which of six standards a document is evidence for is an afternoon of tedium nobody should be spending. In both, the model proposes and a person confirms — an identification carries a confidence figure, and a requirement is linked because you said so, not because software decided.
BusyWait has none and never will. Keeping two calendars in agreement is arithmetic and a webhook, and putting a model behind it would burn real power to do a worse job than a loop already does perfectly. Inference costs electricity and water somewhere, and spending that so a product can say the word on its homepage is a trade we are not going to make.
This is not a page about abstinence written by someone who ships no AI. Two of three products use a model. That is the tension, and it is the reason the restraint is worth anything: BusyWait’s refusal is a choice rather than a limitation, because the sibling products show the studio will reach for a model when the job wants one.
What we will not build
No notetakers, no meeting recorders, no transcription. No engagement mechanics — streaks, nudges, anything designed to make a product stickier without making it better. No data as a second revenue line: what you put into these apps is not sold, not brokered, and not the business model. The subscriptions are the business, which is what makes that sentence checkable rather than reassuring.
What that costs: the competitive set is racing toward AI assistants and meeting intelligence, and those are the features that win comparison tables. Each one is a decision against, not a thing we have not got round to.
Small on purpose, and what it costs you
Support reaches the people who build the product rather than a tier of it, so answers tend to be direct and reasonably quick. The same fact runs the other way: work happens in an order rather than in parallel, and a request that would be a sprint at a larger studio may simply be a no here. Both of those are true, and you should weigh them.
There is no enterprise tier holding the useful part hostage, because there was never a version of this where that made sense. What that costs is the revenue an enterprise tier would bring, which is most of the reason other products have one.
Who we work for
Client work is limited to Scotland and kept deliberately small — it is capacity we can give properly without the products suffering for it. Enquiries from elsewhere get an honest no rather than a slow maybe.
What that costs is most of the market. It is also the only way the sentence above about support staying direct remains true.
Where we are not there yet
The inference we do run has an energy cost we have not measured. Saying it is small because the studio is small is an assumption, not a figure, and until there is a figure this page cannot claim the trade is a good one — only that it is made deliberately.
The hosting footprint is somebody else’s to report and we have not asked for it. A page arguing that inference costs power somewhere should know what its own servers cost.
The sub-processors each product relies on are not yet published as a register. That is the document a buyer actually needs when they are answering their own certification questions, and “contact us” is a worse answer than a table. It is being assembled, and this page will link to it rather than describing it.
Getting in touch
If something here does not match what one of the apps actually does, that is worth knowing about — email hello@ak.dev or use the contact page.