Cratis — the software production platform
Software that remembers.
Design it with your whole team. Watch it run. Then ask it anything about what happened — and get an answer, not an investigation. No rewrite required.
Free to try, no card Open source at the core No rewrite required
Why now
The way software gets made just changed. Most of it hasn't caught up.
Machines now write a growing share of the software your company runs. They work faster than any review process was designed for — and they only understand what your system has actually written down.
Intent leaks out at every handoff
An idea passes through requirements, stories, designs, code and testing before anyone can use it — and every handoff is a translation. What ships is an interpretation of an interpretation, and nobody can say where the meaning went.
Systems that can't explain themselves
Ask most software why it made a decision and the honest answer is that nobody knows. It stored the outcome and forgot everything that led to it. That's an expensive answer to give a regulator, a customer, or a board.
Knowledge that walks out the door
The rules that govern your system live in a handful of people's heads. When they leave, the software keeps running and nobody can safely change it.
Where it matters most
When someone asks what happened, the answer should already exist.
Any business where a decision has consequences later — a payment, a claim, a contract, a shipment — is a business that eventually gets asked to account for itself.
Payments and transfers
Every movement of money kept as a permanent, ordered fact.
Claims and cases
Files that carry their own history, from first contact to resolution.
Orders and inventory
What was promised, what changed, and when — without reconstruction.
Contracts and subscriptions
Every amendment, renewal and cancellation, in the order it occurred.
Identity and access
Who was granted what, by whom, and on what basis.
Supply and logistics
A traceable line from origin to delivery that holds up under scrutiny.
Give it a vague plan and it builds vague software, faster.
The problem Cratis was built to solve
How it works
One production, from the first idea to the running business.
In most organisations, the final authority on what the software does is the code — the one artefact most of the room can't read. Cratis changes what your team gathers around: a shared script everyone can read, a live performance, and a complete record of everything that happened. Four moves, one continuous line.
Design
Your team maps out what the business actually does — the decisions people make, the things that happen as a result, what everyone needs to see. On one canvas, together, in language the business uses.
Studio · Screenplay
Perform
That design becomes a working system — not a document handed to developers to interpret, but the thing that actually runs. What you agreed on and what your customers use are the same artefact.
Stage · Arc
Record
Every decision the business makes is kept as a permanent fact — not overwritten, not summarised away. Your system builds a memory instead of a snapshot.
Chronicle
Explain
Ask what happened and when, and get an answer backed by the record rather than someone's reconstruction. For an audit, an incident, a customer dispute — or an AI agent that needs the real context.
Narrator · Synopsis · Prompter
Adopt the whole pipeline, or start at any point. Each part works on its own — and works better together. And the line is a loop: what the record teaches you feeds the next design.
Our product
Cratis Studio is where all of that starts.
The design step is the one everything else inherits from — so it is the one we built a product around. Studio is where your whole team maps out how the business works, argues about it while that is still cheap, and then watches it run. It is in beta, and it is free to try without talking to us first.
Everyone in the same room
Product people, domain experts, designers and engineers work on one picture at the same time — in business language, so the people who know the business are not spectators.
Press play on the design
What you agreed on becomes something that actually runs, so your team reacts to the real thing instead of imagining it. Being wrong this afternoon costs far less than being wrong next quarter.
Ready for how software is made now
Machines write a growing share of your software and they build what they are told. Studio is where you say precisely what you want — the part that stays human.
What changes
What your organisation gets out of it.
Most tools produce artefacts — requirements, tickets, code, documentation. Cratis closes a gap: from "we have an idea" to "the software does what we intended".
The whole organisation can take part
In most companies, the final say on what the software does is the code — which most of the people who understand the business can't read. Cratis moves that authority to a model everyone can read, question and change. Product people, domain experts and engineers shape the same artefact instead of passing translations down a chain.
Software stops being engineering-onlyThe design and the software stop drifting apart
In most organisations the plan and the product separate quietly within weeks, and nobody finds out until a release goes wrong. Cratis removes the gap structurally — the model your team agreed on is the thing that runs, so it can't quietly stop being true.
Fewer surprises in productionYour system can answer for itself
Every business decision is recorded as it happened, in order, permanently. When an auditor, a regulator, a customer or an executive asks how something came to be, answering is a question you ask the system — not a week of forensic work across log files.
Audit becomes a query, not a projectAI helps instead of accumulating risk
Assistants are only as good as the structure they work inside. Cratis gives them explicit rules a machine can check, so generated work lands inside the lines rather than quietly adding another way of doing the same thing. Speed stops costing you consistency.
Future-ready by constructionKnowledge stays with the company
When how the business works is written into the system rather than carried in senior people's heads, onboarding gets faster and key-person risk drops. New people — and new tools — can read the same model.
Less dependent on who's in the roomYou are not locked in
The software your business runs on is open source, sits on your own infrastructure, and works with the systems you already have. Stop paying us and it keeps running, your history stays yours, and nothing needs migrating. The one thing you would lose is the shared design surface — and what your team designed in it comes out with you.
Open by design, not by promiseHow we help
Get the decisions right while they are still cheap to change.
Most of what we do is not writing code for you — it is working directly with your team on the choices that are easy to make now and expensive to unmake later. You work with the people who build the platform, not a delivery layer in front of them.
We design it with you
A working session with your people — the ones who know the business and the ones who will build it. Everyone leaves with the same picture, in language everyone in the room understands.
We tell you when you are wrong
Including when the answer is that you do not need us. A review that only confirms what you already believed is worth nothing, and we would rather be useful than agreeable.
We build the first piece alongside your team
Not instead of them. The first thing you build sets the pattern everything else copies, so we do it together — and then your team can do the rest without us.
We stay reachable
When something breaks at an awkward hour, the person who answers wrote the code. No ticket queue, no account manager, nobody reading your problem for the first time.
The one artefact everyone depends on is the one artefact most of the room can't participate in. That never stopped bothering us. We built the thing where the whole room takes part.
Working with us
What runs your business is free. What you design it in isn't.
The software your systems actually run on is open source and always will be — no licence to renew, no seat count, nothing to lose if you stop working with us. Cratis Studio, where your team designs together, is the product we charge for. Our time is the other: an ongoing relationship, or a fixed piece of work with an agreed outcome.
Support
For organisations running Cratis in production
- Direct access to the people who build it
- Guaranteed response times when something breaks
- Advisory hours for the decisions that are expensive to reverse
- A written continuity commitment
Advisory
For getting it right the first time
- A design session with your team and ours
- An architecture review, with the risks ranked
- The first piece built alongside your engineers
- Fixed scope, fixed price, agreed outcome
Workshops
For teaching the part that's actually hard
- Designing a system your whole team understands
- Working with a system that records everything
- Building where people and AI follow the same rules
- Built around your business, not a generic deck
How we work
Open, and small on purpose.
Two things make working with us different from working with a software vendor.
We publish what we're building, including the parts that aren't ready — and we'll tell you plainly when Cratis is the wrong fit. More about how we work →
The decisions that cost you are rarely the ones you argued about. They are the ones nobody noticed making — a boundary drawn in a hurry, a shortcut that quietly became the pattern. We build so those are hard to make by accident.
Get in touch
Start with a conversation.
You don't need a finished plan or an approved budget. Tell us what you're working on and we'll tell you honestly whether we can help. The first conversation is a fit review — ninety minutes, free, and if the honest answer is that you don't need us, that's what you'll hear.