SaaS, but yours
Vet du redan? · Know what you need?
Eight engagements, seven with a fixed scope quoted before we start. The full list, and how long each one takes.
All servicesGöteborg & Craiova · The SaaS arm of Chen.ist
Most stacks are rented three times over — the licence, the platform, the region. We replace them with software you can read, machines you can point at on a map, and configuration that stays in your repository after we leave.
Ruby
Nix
CSS
Nextcloud
Node-RED
Huginn
NixOS
WireGuard
pf
Proxmox VE
PostgreSQL
Emacs
Ollama
D2
Ubuntu Touch
Sailfish OS
postmarketOS
Ruby
Nix
CSS
Nextcloud
Node-RED
Huginn
NixOS
WireGuard
pf
Proxmox VE
PostgreSQL
Emacs
Ollama
D2
Ubuntu Touch
Sailfish OS
postmarketOS
Tre löften · Three promises
The three things every engagement ends with, whichever of the eight it started as.
Datahemvist · Data residency
Picking an EU region inside an American hyperscaler leaves the contract, the parent company and the applicable law exactly where they were. We move the machines, which is the part that changes the answer you give an auditor.
Äganderätt · Ownership
Open source throughout, so there is no licence to be revoked and no roadmap to be taken away. The whole estate is declared in files you hold, which is also what makes an audit a morning rather than an archaeology project.
Överlämning · Handover
The engagement ends with runbooks, a recorded walkthrough and two weeks of pairing with your team. The goal is that you do not need us afterwards — which is a strange thing to sell and the reason clients come back.
Vad vi gör · What we do
We are deliberately narrow. The first seven are things we have shipped repeatedly and can quote to a fixed price. The eighth is the honest exception — bespoke work, scoped by discovery rather than from a menu.
Marketing sites, documentation portals and handbooks built as static HTML — fast, cheap to host, and impossible to hack in the usual ways.
02Self-hosted project management with twenty years of history behind it — installed, secured, migrated and maintained on your own infrastructure.
03Files, calendars, contacts, documents and video calls on your own servers — the office suite your staff already expect, without the American data transfer.
04The joins between your systems, built once and version-controlled — Node-RED flows over Redmine and Nextcloud, on NixOS, replacing the spreadsheet somebody maintains by hand every Friday.
05NixOS, WireGuard and pf: declarative servers, private networking and firewalls you can read out loud in a review meeting.
06Off the hyperscaler, onto EU and EEA providers — sequenced so nothing goes dark, and costed before a single byte moves.
07Open-weight models on hardware you own, wired into the tools you already use — and the serving, versioning and measurement that turn a working prototype into something a company can depend on.
08The thing you need is not on this list, but it is almost certainly assembled from parts that already exist. We find them, join them, and hand the result to you under a licence you keep.
Verktygslådan · The toolbox
Nothing here is chosen for novelty. Each of these is auditable, has an active upstream, runs on hardware we can point at, and can be handed to your team without a licence negotiation.
Boring, expressive, and still here in ten years.
RubyLanguage
Optimised for the happiness of the people who have to read the code six months later.
Ruby on RailsWeb framework
One well-understood framework beats six micro-services nobody can draw on a whiteboard.
NixBuild & package language
A language whose entire purpose is that the same expression produces the same artefact, forever.
BashShell & glue
The one language that is already installed on every machine you will ever be asked to fix.
htmxFront-end library
A responsive interface without a second application, a second build and a second team.
CSSStyling
Modern CSS does what a build step used to, which means one fewer thing between you and the page.
The software most companies rent by the seat, on machines you hold the invoice for.
JekyllStatic site generator
Content in Git, HTML on disk, nothing to patch at three in the morning.
RedmineProject & issue tracking
Twenty years of project history in your own PostgreSQL database, on your own disk.
NextcloudFiles & collaboration
Files, calendars, documents and calls on a machine in Stockholm — the answer that does not need a transfer-impact assessment.
Node-REDWorkflow automation
Flow-based automation under foundation governance — no vendor that can change its mind about the licence.
HuginnMonitoring agents
Agents that watch things and act — MIT, community-run, and written in the same Rails your tracker already runs.
Declarative, auditable, and yours to keep.
NixOSOperating system
The whole machine described in one file, built identically every time, rolled back in one reboot.
WireGuardPrivate networking
A few thousand lines of auditable kernel code instead of a VPN appliance with a support contract.
pfOpenBSD packet filter
A firewall ruleset that reads like a sentence — and can be reviewed by a human in an afternoon.
Proxmox VEVirtualisation platform
One machine turned into many, with backups and live migration, and no per-socket licence to renew.
The whole stack — twenty-one technologies, each with a page on why
Demokratisk design · How we work
Five dimensions that have to hold at once, or the thing is not good enough. We have borrowed the framing from a rather larger Swedish company — it was written for furniture, but it describes what good infrastructure has to be just as well.
It has to be legible. A firewall ruleset you can read aloud, a server described in one file, a site whose source a new engineer understands before lunch. Configuration is something people read far more often than they write.
It has to do the job on an ordinary Tuesday, not in a demo. Fewer moving parts, boring technology, and a system that behaves the same in year four as it did in week one.
Reproducible or it did not happen. Infrastructure is a text file in your repository: a new machine is one command away, an old one is one rollback away, and backups are restore-tested with the evidence sent to you.
It has to outlive us. Open source throughout, so nothing can be revoked; European hosting, so the jurisdiction question has a short answer; refurbished hardware that can be repaired rather than replaced.
Accessible, not cheap. No seat licences, no per-user tiers, no bill that changes shape without warning — and a fixed price, in writing, before you commit to anything.
Arbetsgången · The sequence
Every engagement runs the same way, whether it is a five-page site or a migration off three hyperscaler regions. You can stop after any stage and keep everything produced up to that point.
I siffror · By the numbers
100%
Of the software we deliver is open source, licence-free and forkable.
61%
Median reduction in monthly hosting cost after a migration to European providers.
38ms
Median time to first byte across the Jekyll sites we operate, measured from Frankfurt.
0
Bytes of client data that have ever left the EU or EEA on our watch.
Datahemvist · Data residency
Yes — in Romania, Sweden or Germany.
You choose the country. You hold the account and the invoice at the provider — we hold an operator credential you can revoke in thirty seconds.
Vad kunderna säger · What clients say
They deleted more than they built. Six months on we run a third of the services, on a quarter of the budget, and I can read the entire infrastructure in an afternoon.
The migration was costed before a single byte moved, and the number at the end was the number at the start. That had not happened to us before.
Every configuration is in a repository we own. When they finish, we can still read what they built — that was the whole point.
Journalen · Notes from the workshop
Occasional notes on the things we keep having to explain twice: static sites, declarative servers, packet filters and where your data sleeps.
Refurbished ThinkPads arriving with GNU/Linux or BSD already working — every function key, the fingerprint reader, the dock — p...
Read →Running the event, and the harder part afterwards — turning a good weekend into an organisation that is genuinely comfortable w...
Read →TALA went open source last week. That is a good excuse to explain why every diagram we hand a client is a text file under versi...
Read →Nästa steg
A first conversation costs nothing and takes forty minutes. You will leave it with an honest opinion about your stack — including, occasionally, that you should change nothing at all.