Why some things at Altumdream will have a price

I. What the price is for

Some things at Altumdream will have a price now. Here's what that price is for.

I want to do research. Not as a hobby that survives on the weekends, but properly: a vector database that stays on disk and still gives you full recall, a microVM monitor for arm64, a small language model trained in ways nobody sane would sign off on, Gleam libraries kept alive and maintained instead of abandoned at version 0.3 like most of what you find on Hex.

That's it. That's the entire ambition. It isn't a startup, it doesn't scale, and there's no exit at the end of it.

II. Nobody asked, and that's fine

You could tell me that nobody asked for any of this. Fair. Nobody did.

So let's be clear about what this is. I'm not making a case, and I'm not passing a hat. There's no cap in hand here, no hardship story with a donate button waiting at the bottom. I'm telling you why something I publish now carries a price tag, and what that tag is holding up. That's all. You can read the whole thing, buy nothing, and we're still fine.

It's the accounting, said out loud, by someone who'd rather say it than have you guess.

III. I'd rather be doing this for you

The truth is I'd rather do this for someone else. I'd take a pure R&D role tomorrow, at a company, at a lab, anywhere someone wanted these questions answered and was willing to pay for the answers. That job doesn't exist where I live.

And let me be blunt, because there's no dignified way to put it. If someone out there reads this and thinks: you can keep all of this running while you work for me, and you can keep living exactly where you live, I'd drop this whole story tomorrow. Not the research. The story. The shop, the storefront, the pricing page, the invoices, the part where I have to convince you of anything. I'd hand all of that over without a second of nostalgia and go do the work.

That offer isn't on the table. So I built the table.

IV. Two minutes from my door

I could leave. Pack up a life, sell the house, go where the work is. People do it every day and I don't think they're wrong.

But two minutes from my door I'm in green. Fifteen and I'm in the woods. There are mountains, there are hillsides planted with vines and olives, there's the lake, and there's quiet. Whatever this territory lacks, and it lacks plenty, it has that, and I'm not trading it.

So the choice is: leave, or build the thing that funds the work here. I'm building the thing.

V. I tried donations

I believe in open source, and not abstractly. I fund other people's projects with donations. Small ones, the kind that change nothing on a spreadsheet, and I know exactly what they're worth to the person on the other end, which is: much more than the amount.

So I tried donations here too. Some people were disarmingly kind, and a few of them know who they are. But there ain't no such thing as a free lunch, as my teacher Maurizio Boscaini loved to repeat, always crediting Milton Friedman for the line. A handful of coffees is not a research budget, and it was never fair to ask it to be one.

There will be more libraries, by the way. There are always more libraries. They're the backbone of everything else I build, the layer I stand on to make the next thing, and they'll keep coming and they'll keep being free.

VI. The part nobody says out loud

Being indie and staying alive is hard, and the code is the easy bit. The code is the part I'd do for free and largely have.

It's everything around it. It's playing entrepreneur with the Italian tax system so that "I want to experiment and make things" can survive contact with a P.IVA, a commercialista, and a rulebook written for people selling furniture. Nobody warns you that the price of making pointless things you love is a quarterly filing.

VII. One person out of seven billion

And some of them are pointless. I'm fine with that.

One person out of seven billion downloading a thing because it was exactly, precisely what they needed is the entire point. Not a market. One person.

Doorry has hundreds of downloads. Not thousands. Hundreds. Maki did dozens in a few days with no advertising, no investment, nothing but existing. The counter on str or cowl ticks up on Hex and someone I'll never meet has my code in their build and it works. People send me email, actual email, about a port monitor and a manga reader. Same for skeg, for amber, for anything else I put out.

That's the reward. That's all of it, and it's enough. I just want to be able to afford it.

VIII. What the money buys

So: small native apps, sold at a small price. They run on your machine, they have no accounts, they never phone home.

That money buys hours. Hours to push skeg further. Hours to answer a maintenance issue on str or cowl the same week instead of the same season. Hours to train a model that has no product attached to it, because I think it's interesting and I want to know what happens.

Look at it this way: a purchase, an in-app unlock, a subscription, whatever the thing ends up being, it goes into making the next thing. It doesn't make a CEO richer. There is no CEO. There's one guy and a compile step.

IX. What stays free

Everything underneath stays open. Apache-2.0, MIT, depending on the project. Free, forever.

That's not the part I'm monetizing. That's the part I'm protecting.

X. And the other part I'm protecting is you

No cookies on my sites. No analytics. Nothing in the apps that reports back.

I don't watch what you click and call it "improving the product." I don't collect small pieces of you to sell to whoever bids highest so you can be shown one more targeted banner for one more thing you don't need. You are not a data mine.

If you want me to know something, write to me. I'm right here, and I read everything.

XI. The lemonade stand

I have strong opinions and messy methods. I start things I don't finish. I go deep on a problem nobody asked me to solve, look up, and three weeks are gone. I'm human and none of this is a case study.

But I show up. I keep trying to leave something behind that helps someone else make their own thing. That's the only measure I've got for whether any of it was worth doing.

And a lot of the time you live on dreams. That isn't a metaphor. Some months it's a line in the budget.

So here's the journey, honestly. Make things. Build a small lemonade stand. Line up on it the things I made, and stand behind it. And then watch someone pick one up and turn it into a product, an idea, a project, a dream of their own.

That's it. That's the whole business plan.