We will never challenge Big G and the Fruit Company for tech dominance. But you might.

There is no garage, no whiteboard epiphany, no moment we knew. The first version of Filamental was built to map out a digital bank, because nothing we had could hold something that size. Twenty whiteboards in we realised two things at once: we were losing coherence across the entity, and it resolutely wasn’t portable - we didn’t own it. That was enough.

When a renewal notice for an expired card went to spam, and a few years of work sat one billing cycle away from somebody else’s delete key, that was a problem.

Nobody did anything wrong in this process, that is the part worth sitting with. The arrangement was perfectly ordinary.

So Filamental keeps your files on your machine, in open formats, in a folder you chose. Not as a philosophy. As a consequence of having been on the wrong end of the alternative.

When you start from the reductionist view that the universe is simply information, the interesting question stops being how much of it there is - it becomes what shape it settles into. What we kept coming back to were the filaments of dark matter: the vast threads that pulled matter into order and decided where everything ended up sitting.

That is a structure nobody drew. It is what information does when you give it room and let the forces act on it. It is also, more or less, what happens on the canvas when you stop arranging nodes by hand and let the physics settle them.

And because we are dealing with things in your head and not spooky things in space, it became Filamental. (We did keep some aliens though.)

We are not building an ecosystem, or an all-in-one, or a place you are supposed to live. Shockingly, we don’t aspire to IPO or become thought-leaders either. You already have tools you like and reasons you like them. We would rather earn a place in your workflow than try to become the whole of it. Use the right tool for the job, and let this be the right tool for what you needed.

The technology, honestly, needs to be the least interesting part. The real work happens on the surfaces, what you create, build and share - you make the difference. We are not going to relentlessly espouse our "game-changing" features, because you have heard that before and it rarely meets expectations.

What we are aiming for is less tangible, someone looks over your shoulder while Filamental is open and says:

"Wait.. what? This is how you think?"

A pinky-swear by a kid in California not to read your data is not a business strategy. They will. And you will pay them money for the privilege.

We are not asking you to believe we are nicer than that. Belief is the wrong instrument. We do not want your data, we do not need it, and we couldn’t hand it over if someone tried to make us, because it never arrives here in the first place. Anything you choose to publish is encrypted on your machine before it leaves, and what our server holds is ciphertext we have no way to open.

The reason most companies end up wanting your data is rarely villainy. It is that they took a great deal of money from somebody once and now have to find a way to pay it back. We did not, so we do not.

We have a ten-year plan, aimed at where we think human and machine interaction actually lands around 2035. A plan that long is mostly a list of things that are not done yet.

Yes, we will probably do an augmented reality version of Filamental because that is often the first question. The obstacles in the way are primarily hardware-related, but also the very boring but obvious-when-you-think-about-it issue that your arms get tired. It’s an easy port though when the time comes (as you can see if you spend time in the app).

You can always check out the changelog, and send us suggestions. We don’t/can’t monitor app usage stats, so we do rely on your feedback and we do listen.

Or at least we aren’t going to tell you about it in exchange for applause.

Filamental runs on your own machine, we don’t hold servers full of your files, and we don’t need a fleet of them training on your data for an ethereal valuation. We aren’t a green initiative, that’s just what local software is.

The honest version of caring is designing something that does not require an apology.