A knife forged to you, free — plus free tools.
The Taster is one of one, shaped by your answers. The rest are one of many, the same for everyone. All are complete, all are yours.
The Taster — one of one, free.
Answer the same seven questions every knife does. Pick two Tools. The Forge drafts a Swiss Knife in your name and hands it over on the spot — no checkout, no e-mail address, no card. It carries everything the paid tiers carry: the Patina (blades that age with use), the Garden (entries that live), the Bequest (a sealed heirloom copy you can strike at any time). Nothing is gated; the Taster simply carries weight 2 where a Pocket Knife carries 6 and a Swiss Knife 12.
The arithmetic of weight, once and plainly: 1 weight = 1 Tool. A Blade weighs 3 or 4. So the Taster (weight 2) holds two Tools; a Pocket Knife (weight 6) is about one Blade and a couple of Tools; a Swiss Knife (weight 12) is roughly three Blades, or one Blade and eight Tools; Every Blade Ever is uncapped. Founding prices: Taster $0 · Pocket $39 · Swiss $79 · Every Blade Ever $159 — USD, + local VAT shown at checkout.
The Forge opens the whole catalog with a small note beside what doesn't fit — that is what you come back for. A Taster upgrading later is a first forging at full price for the size it becomes (a Taster was never bought). And nothing is left behind — bring the file, and the reforge carries everything it holds: every entry, every day of patina, the garden as it stands. Reforging within its weight is free forever, like every knife.
Three free knives — cast, not forged.
Every claim we make about the Knife itself — no account, no cloud, no phone-home, works forever — is easier to demonstrate than to argue. So here are three finished knives from the catalog, free. Download one, put it on a USB stick, open it in ten years. It will not ask who you are.
The Almanac. Moon phase, next full moon, sunrise, sunset and day length — computed from orbital mathematics alone. No data files, no network. The sky, done offline.
Passphrase Maker. Strong passphrases made on your device, shown once, stored nowhere. This is the one tool that should be offline — and here, you can verify it is: pull your network cable first if you like. It works exactly the same.
Kombucha Calendar. Brew date in — taste day, bottling day, fridge day out. Burp daily. Yes, this is a real product. The catalog goes exactly this deep in every direction.
The Activist's Engine — free, and free software.
A campaign headquarters in a single HTML file: thirteen interconnected tools for planning and running a campaign, with a threat model written plainly, three sample campaigns to import, and a switch that leaves nothing at all on the machine. It is free of charge and licensed AGPL-3.0, so copy it, host it, change it, teach with it. Organising work should never live on someone else's server.
There's no e-mail gate on any of this. If one of these earns a place on your desktop, the Forge is where the real knives are made — the ones in the exact shape of your life.
Each file is complete in itself. Saving your own copy is the installation.
Six free tools
Six small, standalone tools that live on their own pages — free, private, and embeddable anywhere.
- The Subscription Mirror — Add up what you rent and see its real yearly cost.
- Equal Pay Day — Turn a country's gender pay gap into a date on the calendar.
- Global Pride Calendar — Every major Pride around the world in 2026, on a rainbow wheel.
- The Real Egg Cost — Add what the flock consumes. See what an egg actually costs — feed, bedding, coop and all. Free, private, works offline.
- The TBR Reckoning — Count what waits on the shelf — your to-be-read pile measured against an average lifetime of reading. Free, private, works offline.
- The Quilter's Binding — Strips, yardage, and the bias square — how much binding your quilt actually needs. Free, private, works offline.