Don't be loved; be lovely.
That's the founding line. It's a reminder that the goal isn't to be popular or growth-maxing — it's to be genuinely good at the thing: making software that handles personal data with honesty and restraint.
The why
I started shenas because I kept running into the same frustration: tools that claim to help you understand yourself quietly make their business from the data you generate. The incentives are backwards. The thing that's supposed to serve you ends up serving advertisers, acquirers, or a future acqui-hire. Your health records, your sleep patterns, your finances — they leave your hands the moment you install the app.
The fix isn't to opt out of quantified-self software. The fix is to build it differently: raw data stays on your own hardware, the pipeline runs locally, and nothing leaves the mesh unless you explicitly ask it to.
What I believe
Privacy first, then wisdom, then science, then fun — in that order. Don't lie. Don't cheat. Don't moralize; be moral. Respect differences in goals. Say what you mean.
In engineering terms: privacy by default,raw data stays local, no telemetry. No rolling your own crypto. No moving records off-device. When aggregate insights are useful, they travel via differential privacy and secure aggregation — wisdom, not records.
The product
Shenas is a local-first quantified-self platform. It gathers health, finance, and lifestyle data from services you already use, normalizes it across your own home mesh — laptop, phone, tablet, server — and helps you find patterns. It is not a cloud service and is not trying to become one.
The community version is free, open source, and will stay that way. The local pipeline, the on-device models and the privacy primitives stay in the community version.
shenas is open-core. What is sold is the operation of a service: either it needs a party who is not you, or it is a convenience over something the community version already does for free.
Nothing on this list is for sale yet.
Account services
- Identity / namespaceNot yet for sale
Needs someone other than you: the namespace and identity operator; a name has to be issued and kept unique by whoever runs the namespace
If you leave: the community version runs with no account; keys and data are untouched; the name lapses
- RelayNot yet for sale
Needs someone other than you: two devices behind NATs cannot both be the relay between them
If you leave: direct paths keep working; anyone can run the same upstream relay
- MailboxNot yet for sale
Needs someone other than you: someone holds ciphertext for a peer that is offline
If you leave: live and relayed delivery continue; only store-and-forward for offline peers stops
- Push relayNot yet for sale
Needs someone other than you: the holder of the app's push credential at the platforms; a push sender is the app's publisher, not its user
If you leave: the app fetches when opened
- RecoveryNot yet for sale
Needs someone other than you: a witness holding a recovery shard; a user who has lost every device cannot be their own witness
If you leave: the user's own copy of their key material, kept where they choose
- InheritanceNot yet for sale
Needs someone other than you: custody that outlives the user; someone holds the instruction and acts when the user no longer can
If you leave: the user hands the key to a person themselves
- Signed plugin channelNot yet for sale
Needs someone other than you: a vouch is someone else's statement; the company reviews and signs as one signer among those the user trusts
If you leave: the trust store and every plugin stay; only the company's signature stops being renewed
Hosted compute and storage
- LLM proxy → mixnetNot yet for sale
Needs someone other than you: the account holder at the model provider is the company, so the provider sees the company's account, not the user's, though prompt content can still identify the person; later, the anonymity set of the other users
If you leave: the community version calls a provider with the user's own key, or a local model
- BackupNot yet for sale
Needs someone other than you: storage the user's own devices do not provide, holding ciphertext the operator cannot read
If you leave: export to a place the user holds and replication across their own devices; the company's copy is never the only copy
- Cloud workersNot yet for sale
Already free: the same worker runs on the user's own always-on machine
If you leave: the user runs the worker themselves; a hosted worker holds only a cache and its configuration
How it's run
Bootstrapped, no outside investment. Day-to-day operations are agent-led — roles like CTO, CISO, Legal, and engineering run as configured AI agents under founder oversight, working against versioned values and per-role briefs. The company runs on the same data pipeline the product offers users. If the architecture can't run a company, it probably can't run a person either — and I'd rather find that out on myself first.
Where things are
Stage 0: agent-first operations live, desktop alpha in daily founder use, agentic feedback system being dogfooded against company operations. The first public release will be a free, open-source community version for the quantified-self cohort, distributed via package repositories and word of mouth.
Find me
- github.com/afuncke
- shenas-org/shenas Public mirror (shenas-org/shenas): Last updated 2026-05-23. Treat it as frozen; do not rely on it for current releases.