Software has a tendency to grow. A tidy little app that did one job gains a second feature, then a tenth, then an account system, a dashboard, a “platform,” and a settings screen you need a map to navigate. Each addition made sense on its own. The sum is something slower, heavier and harder to use than the thing you first liked. We try hard not to build that.
An old idea, for everyone
Programmers have a phrase for this: do one thing and do it well. It comes from the way the best command-line tools were designed decades ago — small, sharp programs you could combine. The idea isn't just for programmers, though. A kitchen knife that's only a knife beats a twelve-function gadget you have to unfold. Focused tools are easier to pick up, easier to trust, and easier to keep good.
What “focused” actually buys you
- You learn it in seconds. A tool that does one thing has an interface that explains itself. There's nothing to configure before you can start.
- It's fast. Less code doing less means less to load and less to wait for.
- It breaks less. Fewer moving parts means fewer things that can go wrong, and fewer surprises in your way.
- It respects your attention. No upsells for features you didn't come for, no dashboard demanding to be checked.
Where it shows up in what we make
PL Tools is the clearest example: instead of one giant “office suite,” it's a shelf of small, single-purpose tools — merge a PDF, compress an image, make a QR code, size a passport photo — each on its own page, each doing exactly what its name says and nothing more. Our other products follow the same rule at a larger scale. PaperFinder searches; it doesn't try to also be your email. StockWatcher watches a portfolio; it doesn't pretend to be your broker.
The honest limit
Small isn't always right. Sometimes a job genuinely needs several steps joined together, and splitting them into separate tools would just make more work. When that's true, we build the bigger thing — but deliberately, because the task needs it, not because adding features is the easy way to look busy. The test we keep coming back to is simple: would this make the tool more useful to the person using it, or just bigger?
Most of the time, the most useful thing we can do is keep it small.