Some call us anti-SaaS. They don’t mean it as a compliment. It’s usually said with a raised eyebrow, as if we’ve missed the memo that everything must be a subscription, everything must sync, everything must sit quietly on someone else’s server.
We haven’t missed the memo. We’ve just read it.
The modern web has trained us to accept a trade: convenience in exchange for control. Upload your file. Create an account. Start a trial. Enter your card details “just in case.” Somewhere along the way, simple tools became services, and services became pipelines. Your documents flow through infrastructure you’ll never see, governed by policies you’ll never read, stored for reasons you’ll never fully understand.
For a lot of products, that trade makes sense. Collaboration, real-time data, distributed teams — the cloud earns its keep. But not everything needs to phone home. Not every PDF compressor needs a dashboard. Not every file needs to take a trip around the world before it comes back 40% smaller.
fwip was built in that gap.
Not because SaaS is evil. Not because the cloud is bad. But because the default has swung too far in one direction. When every tool uploads your file by reflex, privacy becomes a premium feature. When every app becomes a subscription, ownership feels almost radical.
We think there’s another way.
Software that runs in your browser, on your device, using the compute you already paid for. No accounts. No uploads. No background sync. No “processing…” spinner that really means “sending your file somewhere else.” Just code — WebAssembly, JavaScript — doing its job locally and getting out of the way.
Call it anti-SaaS if you like.
We call it proportion.
The point isn’t to burn down the cloud. The point is to choose it deliberately. If a product genuinely benefits from servers, from shared state, from ongoing infrastructure — great. Charge for it. Run it as a service. But if a tool can live entirely on your machine, if it can respect your privacy by design rather than by policy, then maybe it should.
There’s something quietly powerful about permanent software. You buy it once. You download it. It works offline. It doesn’t expire because a billing cycle lapsed. It doesn’t degrade into a paywall. It doesn’t change terms on a Tuesday.
It just works.
That’s not nostalgia. It’s intent.
fwip exists because we think small tools should feel small again. Focused. Sharp. Honest about what they do and what they don’t. No ecosystem lock-in. No growth hacks disguised as features. Just utility.
In a world where everything uploads your files, keeping them on your device shouldn’t feel rebellious.
But for now, it kind of does.