Software you own outright.

The elevator pitch (what we are)

Offline.Ltd makes software you own instead of rent — small apps that are each just a single file. One file, opened in your browser, working offline forever: no account, no cloud, no subscription, and nothing watching you. You pay once, and it’s yours the way a good knife is yours. It doesn’t only hold your work, either — it holds the whole of a life.

The kitchen-table pitch (the longer version)

Here’s the version you’d get sitting down, with the kettle on.

Most software today is rented, not owned. It lives on someone else’s computer, needs an account, watches what you do, and charges you every month for the privilege. Offline.Ltd is built on the opposite premise: a tool should be a thing you own, the way you own a good kitchen knife — bought once, kept, sharpened when it needs it, and answering to no one but you.

Our products are single HTML files. You download one, open it, and it works — on your laptop, on a borrowed one, on a machine that hasn’t been built yet. There is no server behind it, so there is nothing to phone home to, nothing to leak, and nothing to switch off. Everything you put in stays inside the file, on your machine. You pay once; there’s no subscription. And when your life changes shape, you bring the knife back to the Forge and re-grind it, free, for as long as you own it.

The last part is the part most tools miss. A Swiss Knife isn’t only for the productive third of you — the tasks and the invoices and the sprints. It’s built to hold the rest: the garden, the household, the people you’re trying not to lose touch with, the hobby nobody’s paying you for, the grief you keep quietly in a journal under “Losses.” Fifteen categories, and only two of them are about work. What you end up with is less a productivity app than a self-portrait — in private, digital tools.

Boilerplate (copy-paste ready)

25 words

50 words

100 words

The four positions

1. Durability — software that is just a file

A single .html file is the most durable format personal software has ever had. It needs no installer, no runtime, no company still being in business. A hand-written letter from 1840 is still perfectly legible; a “cutting-edge” multimedia CD-ROM from 1998 is a coaster. We build for the letter, not the CD-ROM. Every Offline.Ltd knife is designed to open and work long after the company that made it is a footnote — because it never needed that company in the first place.

2. Privacy — not a setting, an architecture

Nothing you put into a knife is ever uploaded, because there is nowhere for it to go. Your data lives inside the file, on your machine. This isn’t a privacy toggle you switch on or a policy you have to trust — it’s a consequence of how the thing is built. There is no analytics in the product, no account, no telemetry, no tracking. A knife could not leak your life if it wanted to, because it was never holding it anywhere but with you.

3. Enough — pay once, no subscription

A company built to grow can never say the word “enough,” because growth is the promise it made to its owners and that promise has no ceiling. We built a smaller machine. You pay once — Pocket $49, Swiss $95, or Every Blade Ever $199 — and then the transaction is over and we leave you alone. No renewals, no quiet annual increases, no email in eleven months warning your access is about to lapse. The same decision that removes the subscription is the one that removes the surveillance: we took out the machinery that lets a company grow, because it was the same machinery that lets software watch you.

4. A whole life, not a to-do list

Most personal software only admits the productive third of a person — the tasks, the projects, the metrics of a working day. A life is bigger than that, and messier. The catalogue reflects it on purpose: alongside the invoices and the sprints there’s a garden log and a grief journal, a kombucha calendar and a household purse, a birding list, a faith practice, a record collection, the people you’re quietly trying not to lose touch with. Fifteen categories, and only two of them are about work. A Swiss Knife is shaped to a whole life — the hobby and the home and the health of it, not just the part that shows up on a résumé — because that’s what it means for a tool to actually fit the person holding it.

Three lives (what a whole-life knife actually holds)

Each Swiss Knife is different, because each life is. Three, for the sake of picture:

Nadia — freelance illustrator and beekeeper

Her days split between client work and the hives. Her knife turns tracked hours into invoices in the Freelancer’s Pond, but it also keeps a Garden Planner and a hive-inspection log, catalogues a growing record collection, and runs an Interest & Loan reckoner she admits she uses “for fun” — doing the repayment maths on a boat she has no intention of buying.

Marcus — father of two, keeping a household afloat

His knife holds the Household Purse — bills, daily spending, and one honest number for the month — beside a Meal Prep Planner, a chore board, and Birthday Reminders so no aunt is ever forgotten. It also holds the Writing Desk, where a novel has sat at twelve thousand words for two years. The quirk: the fern that finally died is logged in his Journal, under “Losses.”

Ravi — retired, rebuilding a wooden boat

The Workbench makes every receipt know which part of the hull it paid for. Alongside it: a Tide & Harbour log, a Family Tree with proper GEDCOM export, a quiet faith-practice log, and Unsent Letters — where he writes, most weeks, to people who would be very surprised to receive them, and never do.

None of these lives is only productive, and none of these knives pretends otherwise. That is the point. They are self-portraits in private, digital tools.

The founders

Offline.Ltd, and its parent company Meanwhile, were founded by Twan Janssen and Petur van Sluis.

Twan Janssen (b. 1968, Nijmegen) is a Dutch artist and designer based in Amsterdam. Trained at the Hogeschool voor de Kunsten in Arnhem and the postgraduate Ateliers Arnhem, he has worked as a visual artist since the early 1990s; his work is held in the collection of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, and he has exhibited there and at the Groninger Museum and in galleries across Europe, the United States and China. Much of his work has circled a single question — where one person ends and another begins — a thread that runs, perhaps unexpectedly, straight into a tool built to fit one life exactly. He also co-founded youasme measyou (with Mark van Vorstenbos) — launched in 2009 as the world’s first crowdfunded fashion label and run through 2016; the label won the Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds Mode Stipendium in 2014 (NRC · de Volkskrant). He has worked in art education, criticism and curation, and was co-owner of International Silence, a studio specialised in combining augmented reality with culture, squatting public spaces with installations.

Petur van Sluis, based in Rijswijk, is Twan’s partner in life as well as in business, and the co-founder who makes the sums add up. His own description of the job is transforming numbers into chocolate — the quiet financial craft of keeping a company that refuses to grow both solvent and honest. A privacy enthusiast by conviction, he is the reason the stance here is structural rather than decorative. Given the choice, he would be outdoors.

Founder quotes

“We took out the machinery that lets a company grow, because it was the same machinery that lets software watch you. What’s left is small, and it’s yours, and it will still work when we’re gone.”— Twan Janssen

“A file with .html at the end of its name is the cockroach of computing. It asks for nothing but a crack in the wall, and it outlives every platform that was supposed to replace it.”— Twan Janssen

“Most software is built to need you forever. We wanted to make something that does its job completely and then, radically, leaves you alone.”— Twan Janssen

“I spent thirty years making work about where one person’s agency ends and another begins. About who’s in charge, really. A tool shaped to your life is the same question — only now it’s something you can actually use.”— Twan Janssen

“Other apps organise your work. We wanted to make room for the rest of a life — the garden, the grief, the kombucha — because that’s most of it.”— Twan Janssen

Selected press & recognition (Twan Janssen)

• Collection — work by Twan Janssen held in the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam
• 2021 — de Volkskrant (11 April), on International Silence’s Spinvis concert in augmented reality
• 2017 — NRC Handelsblad (20 April), “Gedichten die dansen boven het gras”
• 2014 — Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds Mode Stipendium, awarded to youasme measyou (NRC)
• 2014 — de Volkskrant, on the same award
• 2011 — NRC Handelsblad, “Werving via een 20-euro biljet” (on the crowdfunding model)
• 2011 — NRC Handelsblad, “Truien in de bomen”
• 2010 — NRC Handelsblad, “Twittermode” (on the crowdfunded label’s launch)

Key facts

Name

Offline.Ltd

Part of

Meanwhile (meanwhile.international) — with elba.works and transitional.life

Founders

Twan Janssen and Petur van Sluis

Based

Amsterdam and Rijswijk, The Netherlands

Founded

2026

Legal form

A VOF (a Dutch general partnership) — the “.Ltd” is a domain extension worn tongue-in-cheek, a wink at big business, not a company structure (so: “Offline.Ltd”, never “Offline Limited”)

What it makes

Single-file, offline HTML apps (“Swiss Knives”), each shaped to one person’s life through a guided intake called the Forge

Catalogue

177 tools across 15 categories — 9 interconnected Blades, 141 trackers, 27 reckoners

Pricing

One-time — Pocket $49 · Swiss $95 · Every Blade Ever $199. No subscription (USD; currency-switchable)

Free

Three free knives — The Almanac, Passphrase Maker, Kombucha Calendar

How it works

No accounts, no cloud, no ads, no email collection, no tracking; data lives in the file; works fully offline

Payments

Paddle (Merchant of Record)

Included

Every knife ships with the Owner’s Manual plus a manual for each Blade

Promise

A guarantee, and free re-forging within your weight

Web

offline.ltd

Press

press@offline.ltd

FAQ

Pull-quotes

“Software you own, the way you own a good knife — bought once, kept, and answering to no one but you.”

“There is nothing to phone home to, nothing to leak, and nothing to switch off.”

“We build for the letter, not the CD-ROM.”

“The same decision that removes the subscription removes the surveillance.”

“A life is bigger than its productive third. A knife should fit the whole thing.”

Explore

• The Catalogue — all 177 tools
• The Factory — how the knives are made
• The Forge — build one in the shape of your life
• Philosophy — the longer argument
• Free knives — try before anything
• Privacy — the plain truth about data
• In plain words — a one-page explainer for newcomers

Press kit (downloads)

• Fact sheet (PDF): offline-ltd-fact-sheet.pdf
• Wordmark (SVG): light · dark · mono black · mono white
• Wordmark (PNG): light · dark · mono black · mono white
• Forge-mark alone: brick · amber
• Screenshots: 01-the-forge.png · 02-a-finished-knife.png · 03-the-owners-manual.png
• The whole kit: offline-ltd-press-kit.zip

Nothing on this page tracks you, and neither does anything you download from it.