Three things changed in the last few years. AI-assisted development made one engineer as productive as a team of five. Cloud infrastructure became a commodity -a production server costs $30/month, not $10,000. And thirty years of open-source maturity means most software is orchestration of free, battle-tested components.
The result: it costs 10-100x less to build and run a software tool than it did five years ago. But a scheduling app still costs $12/month. A CRM still costs $50/seat. Email marketing still costs $100/month. SaaS margins run 80-90% because prices reflect what the market will bear, not what the software costs to deliver.
We started The Commons to close that gap. Every product is priced at infrastructure cost plus a transparent margin. When our costs go down, your price goes down.
Low prices require low overhead. The Autonomous Maintenance System (AMS) is being built to keep The Commons running -within strict, auditable boundaries. AMS is a work in progress; the boundaries below describe the system as designed, and we'll document its rollout on the blog as capabilities come online.
Every action logged in an append-only audit trail. Roll back within 60 seconds. AMS code is source-available.
Operated by Commons Infrastructure LLC, registered in Delaware. No venture funding. No growth targets. No reason to raise prices.
Used by freelancers, therapists, consultants, small agencies, engineering students, and anyone who wants software that costs what it should.