I spent a decade working on software designed to extract.

At Twitter, I was on growth. My job was to make the app harder to put down. We measured success in minutes per session and the size of the next ratchet on a retention curve.

Before that, freemium iOS. The playbook was old: push notifications to re-engage, progress you can't finish for free, a "special offer" timed to the first frustration spike. I didn't invent any of it. I was just competent at executing it.

What changed isn't guilt. I don't carry a grudge against the people I worked with. Almost everyone was trying to ship something good inside a structure that rewards different behaviour. The structure is the problem, not the individuals. I saw enough of it — the full machine, from acquisition-cost spreadsheets to A/B tests on whether shame converts better than curiosity — and eventually it stopped feeling like a puzzle I wanted to solve.

So I stopped. CosmicGlue is what I'm doing with the time.

It's a studio. Apps, games, a few tools. Some paid, most cheap, some free. The through-line is simple: nothing on it is designed to extract from you. No dark-pattern cancel flows. No upsell tier you didn't know existed. No data sold, because there's no data to sell.

The prices are small. Not charity — the price is a filter, not a business model. Enough to cover the servers and prove I'm not going to disappear. Not enough for anyone with a spreadsheet to get excited about. Nobody is pitching any of this to a VC. That's the point.

A few things it isn't.

Not a protest. I'm not angry. I'm just building differently because I can.

Not a redemption arc. I did what I did. Building small, honest software now doesn't erase that — it's just the work I find interesting, on the terms I want.

Not a minimalist performance. There's no moral score to keep. I use Notion. I use Figma. I don't think everything has to be plain text in a terminal. I just don't want to run another company where the roadmap is shaped by what makes the most people pay the most money.

What I'm building is boring on purpose. URL shortener. Uptime monitoring. Widgets for static sites. Analytics without the creepy parts. Idle games without a monetization team. Most of these exist already — they're just $50 a seat, locked behind a sales call, quietly adversarial. I want versions that cost $4 a month, that you can leave whenever, that don't assume you're a growth surface.

That's the whole thing. Small tools, priced like what they are, built to last. No story arc. No grand plan. Just software that should have existed all along.

If that's useful to you, great. If it isn't, also great. There's nothing to sell you.

— Tim