About Cratis
Two people, and the software we'd want to inherit.
Cratis started from a straightforward frustration: the tools were good, but you spent your life keeping them in step with each other. Every layer knew a little and assumed the rest. The plan that was supposed to tie it together lived on a whiteboard, and stopped being true within a month.
So we built the thing where the pieces agree.
Who we are
The two of us.
The honest part
We're small. Here's what that actually means.
The person answering wrote the code
No triage tier, no account manager, no ticket escalated to someone reading the source for the first time. You get an answer from someone who already knows why it works that way.
Everything public, in writing
An open licence on the software you run, the source in public, a published roadmap, a security disclosure process, and a written continuity clause in every support plan. Not because we plan to disappear — because you shouldn't have to take our word for it.
Pretend to be bigger
You can count us, and you should be able to. We'd rather be a small company you can reach than a large one you can't.
The community
Open, and genuinely so.
The software your business would run on is open source and built in the open, where anyone can read the decisions being made about it. Cratis Studio, where your team designs together, is the product we charge for. We would rather draw that line plainly than blur it.
Discord
Questions, design discussion, setup help, and guidance on which repository owns an issue. Free, public, and usually faster than any plan we could sell you.
Prompter
The community's docs assistant, living on Discord. Answers grounded in the documentation with citations — and it says so plainly when the docs don't cover something.
GitHub
Every product, every open question, every change. If you want to know what we are actually working on this week, that is where to look.
Governance
How decisions get made, how proposals become work, and what we ask of contributions.
What we build towards
Values, and the ones that cost us something.
Every company lists values. These are the ones that actually change what we ship.
Empathy
Understanding who we are building for — a colleague, a customer, someone who inherits this in five years — is the whole job, not a step in it.
Simplicity
The internals can be complex. The surface you touch shouldn't be. Developer experience, front and center.
Readability
Code is read far more often than it's written. Naming is most of the work. We're not trying to save keystrokes.
Predictability
Surprises belong to birthdays, not in code. What we promise is what it does, consistently.
Testability
Specs are how a system explains itself to the next person. We favour BDD so the tests read like the behaviour.
Automation
If a computer can do it, make it do it. Repetition is where human error lives.
These come from the values we've published in the open since the beginning — the same ones that govern contributions.