What this actually is

A friend sent you this, which is worth noting, because it is the only way anyone ever hears about us. We don't advertise, and we don't have your email address. So whoever passed this along did it for no reason at all except that they thought you'd like it. Here is what they were on about.

We make software that is just a file. One file, with .html at the end of its name. You download it, you open it, and it works — on your laptop, on a borrowed one, on a computer that hasn't been built yet. There is no account to make. No password. No app store. No monthly fee. No cloud. You don't sign in, because there is no “in” to sign into.

Everything you put into it stays on your own machine, tucked inside the file itself. It is never uploaded, because there is nowhere for it to go and no server waiting to catch it. That isn't a privacy setting you switch on — it is simply how the thing is made. It couldn't leak your life if it wanted to, because it was never keeping it anywhere but with you.

We call each one a Swiss Knife, because it is shaped to a life. One person's knife keeps their freelance hours and turns them into invoices; another's watches a household's month, or a novel's word count, or what a workshop project actually cost. You answer a few plain questions about how your days really go, and it makes you a small set of tools that fit — and then it leaves you alone.

There is a catch, and we would rather say it than have you notice it. Because we run no ads and keep no mailing list, we have almost no way to reach anyone new. We took that machinery out on purpose — it turned out to be the very same machinery that would have let the software watch you. But it leaves us depending, completely, on people telling other people. Which is, as it happens, exactly what just happened to you.

The whole thing rests on that one quiet act.

So if this sounds like a way of using a computer you had half-forgotten was allowed — private, unhurried, yours, paid for once and then left in peace — everything is at offline.ltd. Wander in. Buy nothing until you're sure.

And one last thing, in the spirit of the rest: there is no tracking in this file. No pixel, no analytics, no clever link that reports back. We will not know that you read it, or who sent it to you. We are simply glad they did.

— Offline.Ltd, one small page of a company called Meanwhile