Four apps.
One set of rules.

Most software now follows the same model. You subscribe to it. Your data lives on someone else's server. The product is optimized not for the person using it, but for the engagement metrics that justify its valuation. The interface evolves to surface what the company needs you to see. The pricing changes when they decide it should. This is rational, from certain business perspectives. It is not great, from the perspective of someone who just wants the software to work.

stillward labs makes the other kind. Small tools, built carefully, sold once. The price you pay is the price you pay — no tiers that expire, no features behind a second wall, no subscription that resets the relationship every month. What you buy is yours. When updates come, they come included. When you need the software offline, it works.

The products cover unusual ground. There is a board game, a blackjack tracker, a cash-flow planner, and a retirement simulator. A game and three analytical tools. They don't obviously belong together — except that they were built by the same person, under the same rules, for the same kind of user: someone who reads the footnotes, expects the software to do what it says it does, and does not want to explain their data to a server they don't control.

The analytical tools add a further commitment: where the software computes something — an expected value, a cash-flow projection, a survival probability — the methodology is written down. Not summarized. Written down. Every formula, every assumption, every convention. You should be able to sit with a spreadsheet and reproduce what the software did, step by step. That is not a common standard. It is the one these tools are held to.

None of this is novel. Software used to work this way more often than it does now. stillward labs is not trying to make a statement about the industry. It is just trying to make software worth keeping.