The problem
Software used to be something you owned. Now almost everything is rented: a subscription for notes, another for the editor, another for the thing that syncs them. Your data sits in someone else's database, in someone else's format, behind someone else's pricing page. When they raise the price or shut down, you find out how little of it was ever yours.
The usual alternative — free, open-source software — has a reputation problem. Too often it is powerful but grey, fiddly to set up and left to fend for itself. People should not have to choose between owning their tools and enjoying them.
What we build instead
Lyfie makes libraries, apps and games that are free, open source and pleasant to use. Every project is released under an open-source licence, developed in public on GitHub, and designed with the same care you would expect from a paid product.
What we promise
- No paywalls. Every feature ships to everyone. There is no pro tier waiting behind the free one.
- No harvesting. Our software does not phone home, and our sites make no third-party requests. What you do with our tools is your business.
- No lock-in. Open formats and plain files wherever we can. Our apps are built to be self-hosted — usually with a single Docker command — so they run on your hardware, not ours.
- Honest labels. Every project says how mature it is. Stable means stable; beta means keep your backups.
- Care over count. We would rather ship fewer things, properly, than many things half-way.
How we work
Lyfie is run as a small open-source organisation with a benevolent-dictator-for-life model: one person keeps the direction coherent, and everyone is welcome to shape it. Issues, ideas and pull requests are how decisions get made. Sponsorship keeps the lights on; it never buys features that others cannot have.
Free software should feel like a gift, not a compromise. That is the horizon — and we intend to get there first.