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. The habit behind it is older than the company: more than fifteen years of professional work on systems that had to keep their history, and of learning what a durable record is actually worth. Cratis is where that experience became a company — one deliberate ecosystem we keep building and standing behind, not a drawer of side projects.
Who we are
The two of us.
The lineage
More than fifteen years of learning from event-sourced systems.
Cratis is the current generation of work that began around 2010 and has continued through successive frameworks, companies and production systems. The names and implementations changed. The hard questions did not: how to model facts well, evolve them safely, explain current state and make the next team productive.
Experience, not a maturity shortcut
Fifteen-plus years means we have seen approaches work, strain and get replaced. It does not make every new Cratis surface mature. Build is the established open foundation; Studio is described as preview software because that is where it is today.
Founder-led Assurance
Assurance, workshops, and support are founder-led today. The signed agreement defines availability, points of contact, and escalation.
The honest part
We're small. Here's what that actually means.
Support stays close to the product
Assurance is currently delivered by people who work on the stack. Signed agreements define response targets, capacity, and escalation.
Public facts, in writing
Cratis Build repositories state their licenses in public. The site also publishes a security reporting route, current product maturity, and the support commitments already offered. Where a formal policy does not exist yet, we say so.
Pretend to be bigger
You can count us, and you should be able to. We agree capacity and response commitments in writing for each engagement rather than implying unlimited access.
The community
Open, and genuinely so.
Cratis Build is developed in public under the license stated by each repository. Cratis Studio, where teams design together, is a paid Preview product. 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
Cratis Build repositories publish source, issues, and change history according to each project's workflow. If you want to see current public work, that is where to look.
Governance
How decisions get made, how proposals become work, and what we ask of contributions.
What we build toward
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 favor BDD so the tests read like the behavior.
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.