Capitalism has made technology alienating.

We pay dearly for licenses on tools we use at 20 to 30% of their capacity — with no control over the features, no control over the data. Entire organizations rent their ability to function from actors who hold the power of life and death over them. Organizations have become the vassals of their technology vendors.

Humans should not have to endure technology. Technology should serve humans.

I know what I’m talking about. For eight years, I built custom information systems for my clients, pushing the market’s best no-code tools to their limits — Zapier, Airtable, Make, Webflow, Retool — patched with custom code when they weren’t enough. That’s how my company made its living: selling services on top of tools we didn’t control. For eight years, I built golden prisons.

I was building systems my clients depended on and had no control over. An API breaks: readjust everything. A platform disappears: the tool disappears. The day Autocode’s founder got recruited by OpenAI, the platform was shut down a month after the announcement. Three of my client projects were going to die with it. I recoded everything by hand so their tools would survive — and I felt completely dependent on the life and politics of a platform I had zero control over. And I kept doing the same work over and over: 50 to 70% identical from one company to the next, rebuilt every single time. What’s the point of no-code tools if you can’t build things that are robust, that last, at a reasonable cost?

Living through eight years of that — I find it unbearable.

Renting a tool to move fast is fine — for a while, to get started. But when it becomes permanent, you’re selling your freedom, you’re selling your control, and politically you become deeply dependent. An organization is humans who decide to collaborate on a shared mission. It should not depend on an external organization’s on/off switch. And yet: American companies supply most of our software, store our business data, and the CLOUD Act hands them the keys. We are vassals of the United States. That’s not OK. People live in golden prisons and don’t know how to get out or do things differently — because that’s what they’ve always been sold.

Me, I believe we will never rent software again.

With AI, the cost of code has collapsed. Building your own software — at the same quality as the big market players — costs almost nothing anymore. Tomorrow, internalizing your entire information system will be the norm, and paying SaaS licenses will be considered heresy: more expensive, less freedom, less quality. Technology is no longer where the value is — the value is all the human around it. The world we’re moving toward is one where every organization, even with very few resources, controls its information system from A to Z — its features, its data, its budget. Where it focuses less on the how, and much more on the why and the with whom. Where technology is no longer a problem.

Sovrium exists to prove this is possible. The day that idea is proven, Sovrium has won — even if Sovrium disappears.

Concretely, Sovrium is a configuration interpreter. Not a platform to deploy with Docker everywhere: a single binary. You download it, you run it on a config file — one you write yourself or have an AI write — and boom, you have your complete application: database, API, authentication, pages, automations, and its admin console. On your servers. One config → one quality application. Period.

All the technical infrastructure is already coded, tested, maintained — once, for everyone. All that’s left is your business. We’ve always assumed business and infrastructure were inseparable. That’s bullshit: how you express your business doesn’t matter. You can express it in a simple document — and AI writes config far better and far faster than it writes code. In fact, Sovrium itself is structured to be coded 100% by AI. I own that.

Sovrium is not no-code: your config is code — versioned, diffed, reviewed in Git. Sovrium is not a SaaS: it runs on your machines; we are never in the path of your data. And there is no built-in editor: your app is described in files, not behind an interface.

The engine is free, and it will stay free. No license keys, no gated features, no enterprise edition. It’s in the name, in its soul: Sovrium will never depend on the Sovrium company to function. If the company disappears tomorrow, every instance keeps running. And I’ll be honest: today, Sovrium’s single point of failure is me — a solo founder. That’s exactly why the engine is free and why the code will outlive us. Your sovereignty does not rest on my health.

We don’t sell sovereignty — it’s free. We sell your capacity to become sovereign: guidance (Partner), training (Academy), managed hosting and assisted editing (Cloud). You no longer pay for a dependency; you pay for competence, care, autonomy. Sovrium’s job is to make sure you no longer need Sovrium to live. Yes, this model kills a business model — per-seat SaaS licensing. That’s the point. Copying Sovrium means abandoning Airtable’s and Retool’s business model.

I am my own customer. Sovrium runs Sovrium — our site, our apps, our business. Every problem you’ll hit, I hit before you.

Four values decide everything, and they cost us. Integrity: absolute consistency between words and actions. Humility: we don’t pretend; we make visible what we don’t know. Care: we’re here to solve problems, not create new ones. Sovereignty: yours, not ours. And there are things we refuse. We will never create dependency on Sovrium. We will never manufacture fake problems to sell better. We don’t work with people in bad faith — those who seek confrontation over collaboration, those who don’t take care of the humans they work with.

We work with those who want to internalize, not those who want to outsource everything. You have the right to be a vassal of the United States — that’s your choice. If you’re just looking for one more tool to rent, there are plenty of others. But if you’re reading this and thinking “this is exactly what I’m living through” — whether you’re an organization that wants to take back control, or someone who wants to build this with us — then we’re going to get along. I believe in this 2000%.