An independent publisher, and one that means to stay so
One company writes this engine and sells it, and that is what gives you a second supplier where you were down to one.
What a second supplier is
Everybody who buys parts for a living knows this one. You do not buy every screw from the same works. Not because the works is bad — because the day it puts its prices up, or stops making the size you use, or is bought by somebody with other plans, you want a second name in your address book.
Software is bought the same way, except that a piece of software sits deeper in your own product than a screw does. The part of your programs that writes your invoices, your payslips, your statements and your labels is not something you swap in an afternoon. So the question a technical director asks before signing is not whether the thing is any good — it is what happens if they have to leave.
That question has an answer only if there is somebody to leave for.
What has changed on this market
Over the last three years this market has gathered into very few hands. A technical director who wanted two suppliers for the same piece has a hard time finding two today.
We are one of the ones left, and we are writing this down.
What we commit to
Five things. Each of them is about us, and each of them can be checked on this website rather than taken on trust.
- No count of what you owe us after the fact. Our licence does not put a check inside your walls, does not ask what you installed, and does not send us anything. There is nothing in the software that reports back.
- The licence is readable before you buy, in full, on this website, with no account to create and nobody to talk to first — and every figure we charge is written beside it.
- We sell to companies, and one company takes the money: ours. No reseller sits between you and us, so nobody's margin has to grow.
- Everything the engine can do is on this website, with a document you can download for each of them and the program that wrote it. What we cannot do yet is written there too.
- Everything runs on your machines if you want it to. Buy the library or the server and nothing you produce ever leaves your premises: there is nothing in them that would send it.
Technically
What is delivered is a compiled Rust library and a CPython wheel built against the stable ABI, both pinned to a version, both fetched from your account here and resolvable from your own artefact store. No build step on the target, no compiler required, and no package index reached at install time.
Zero network traffic from the library, by construction: there is no HTTP client in the dependency tree, and no code path that opens a socket. It runs in a build chain cut off from the network and in a container with no way out. Licence checking is a signature verified against a key embedded in the binary — an offline operation, with no call home, no floating licence daemon and no seat count.
Output is deterministic: the same inputs give back the same bytes, because the writer never reads the clock. That is what lets you compare two builds and lets a regression suite pin a document byte for byte — and it is what the twin-checking script behind this site does across every worked example, in Rust, in Python and as a request over the internet.
Where to look next
Our licence, and why your own code stays yours What you pay, and for how long Changing the library that writes your documents What becomes of the documents you send