About

Almost every organisation between two and two hundred people ends up with the same arrangement, and none of them chose it. A spreadsheet that started as a list and became the database. A shared inbox holding what was actually agreed. A calendar no one can read across. And the most valuable thing the business owns, which is what it knows about the people it works with, living in the memory of whoever happens to remember it.

This is not a discipline failure and it is not fixed by asking people to be more organised. It is what happens when the tools that are easy to start with have no way to hold a relationship, and the tools that can hold a relationship are priced and shaped for organisations ten times the size.

Consonas is for that gap: a real system of record that a small business can be running properly by the end of an afternoon.

And one technical reason

There is a second reason, which is less obvious from a pricing page and matters more over time. Almost every system of this kind keeps every customer's records in one shared database and relies on each query carrying the right condition to separate them.

It is a reasonable way to build software and almost everyone does it. It has exactly one failure mode, and the failure mode is that a query written without that condition returns one customer's records to another, silently, with nothing about the request looking unusual while it happens.

We thought that was worth doing differently, and doing it differently is the kind of decision that has to be made at the beginning or not at all.

What it means in your favour

The person answering the address is somebody who can change the product. A request that describes a real problem genuinely moves the order of work, and several things now built arrived that way. There is no sales team, no qualification call and no demonstration to sit through before you can use it.

There are also fewer people with access to anything, which is a real security property instead of a marketing one.

Where an argument needs more room than a page here gives it, it goes on the blog, which is occasional instead of a schedule.

What it means against us

We do not hold SOC 2 or ISO 27001. There is no published penetration test. There is no marketplace, no partner network and no consultant in your city who already knows the product. The list of systems we connect to is short, and the customers page still has no one on it. If your procurement requires a certification, we are not the right supplier yet and would rather tell you now.

There are also fewer people to notice something, which is the other side of the security property above, and the security page treats it as both rather than only the flattering half.

The question worth asking, and the answer

What happens if we stop. It is the right question to ask any supplier of our size and it deserves a straight answer rather than reassurance.

Your data is exportable, completely, free, on every plan, at any time, without asking, in a format that opens without our software. Run one on your first afternoon so you know what it produces, and periodically thereafter so a current copy exists somewhere we do not control. That is the honest answer, it is entirely in your hands, and we would give the same advice about any small supplier including ourselves.

Someone is ill, or away, for a fortnight

The product does not need any of us to be awake. It runs on Cloudflare, where each organisation's database is a Durable Object of its own. Requests are served whether or not anyone is at a desk, and nothing about an ordinary day requires a person here to press anything.

What stops is everything else. Replies get slower, fixes wait, and a question needing someone to read code waits for that somebody. The response targets on the contact page are what we are prepared to commit to rather than what usually happens, and the gap between the two is deliberately where a fortnight of illness goes.

The company is bought

The terms allow us to transfer the agreement to a company acquiring the business. If that happens we will tell you, you may leave, and the acquirer takes the terms exactly as written, which means changing them materially still costs thirty days' notice.

The price goes up

At least thirty days' notice by email before any increase, and it is in the terms rather than in a blog post. The free plan is a plan rather than a trial: it does not expire and does not turn into a paid one through inaction.

The company stops altogether

There is no source code escrow, no undertaking to publish the source if we stop, and no commitment to a wind down period of any particular length. We could write all three sentences this afternoon and none of them would be worth what it appeared to be worth, because a promise about a company's final month is made by the version of that company least able to keep it.

You outgrow us, or decide in month two that this was wrong

Leaving looks the same whether it happens in month two or in year four. Export, then close the organisation from inside the product, which begins a real deletion instead of setting a flag on a row. It asks twice and then holds everything for thirty days, in which you can still export it or simply reopen the organisation, because a closure somebody regrets on the Tuesday should not be an email to us on the Wednesday. We would far rather that happened in week one than in month six. The version of this we find genuinely painful is not the customer who leaves: it is the one who stays quietly for a year without the thing they needed and never mentions it.