Free can mean a lot of things, and most of them are disappointing. A free tool is often a demo with the useful parts removed, or a trial that quietly starts asking for money, or — worse — a product where you are the price, paying with your data and your attention. We wanted to offer something different: tools that are genuinely complete, genuinely free, and built to respect the person using them. No account to create, no card to enter, no telemetry watching over your shoulder. You download them, and they are yours.
There is a reason beyond goodwill. Putting capable, private tools into everyday hands is the fastest way to learn what is actually useful, and the surest test of whether our principles hold up outside a demonstration. A tool that has to run on your own machine, without a remote service to lean on, has nowhere to hide. If it is genuinely helpful under those conditions, it is helpful — and that is exactly the kind of foundation we want to build the rest of our work on.