fair.ninja
Meet Tomato
Everyday apps. Built around your freedom.
You deserve tools that respect your time, your data and your right to leave. We’re building everyday apps around that belief. Starting with Tomato.
All the bells and whistles. From day one.
Colours, advanced stats, API and MCP.
No subscription. No upgrade prompts.
Here for the ideas? Explore four essays on what “fair” means.
Free local apps. One shared chip wallet.
Optional sync for 0.5¢ a day.
First up: Tomato. Focus, plan your day, understand your time.Meet your first tool
01 / What we refuse to build
Your forgetfulness
should not be
a business model.
Designing a business to profit from people forgetting to cancel is evil. Deliberately making cancellation difficult is evil.
You are exploiting someone’s distraction, exhaustion or lack of time. You are treating their wish to leave as an opportunity to extract one more payment. That is a conscious choice about how to treat another human being.
We refuse to build that kind of business. Fair Ninja exists to give people more control over their tools, their data and their everyday lives.
Fictional companies. The mechanisms we reject.
A payment that keeps arriving is not enough to tell us that somebody still wants the service. We need to ask what they understood, how they were invited to decide, and what happened when they tried to leave. We explain why this distinction matters, with experiments, payment data and a real cancellation case.
Read: Your forgetfulness should not be a business modelA letter from Fair Ninja
Fair Ninja starts with a conviction about how people deserve to be treated. The business model follows from it.
Vigilance so that a trial does not turn into a bill. So that a monthly price does not turn out to mean a yearly commitment. So that your own work does not end up on the other side of another upgrade. So that the cancellation button does not disappear into a maze of screens.
People have lives. They forget things, get tired and deal with things that matter more. We do not want to build a company that treats those ordinary limits as opportunities to extract another payment.
What frustrates us most is the ability and work that can go into this. An engineer can build something useful. A designer can make somebody’s day simpler. We want that effort to go towards tools that help people do what they themselves consider important.
We want to make small, well-built apps. Tools you open, use to do your thing, and close. Tools that work on your device, let you take your data with you and connect to your own workflow. We also want to earn money fairly, with a price you can understand and a service you can choose.
To us, that is what progress should look like: more capability, more freedom and fewer things you have to keep an eye on.
The full letter and our nine convictions02 / What we believe instead
A good tool gives you more control over what you can do. It should work when you need it, let you take your work with you and fit into the way you choose to live.
That is the kind of software we want to build.
No connection. Still your tool.
The connection can disappear. Your local tools don’t have to.
Open your app, do your work, carry on with your day. Local functionality belongs on your device.
We want a server to add a service you choose, rather than become a condition for every small task. A flight or an afternoon away from the network should be an ordinary situation in the design of a local app.
See how Tomato works offline
Your effort belongs to you
Keep it on your device. Export it. Take it with you.
The more you put into a tool, the more control you should have over your work. Leaving is your choice to make.
Your tasks, notes and history represent time you have already spent. A backup, a different workflow or a decision to move on should not turn that effort into a bargaining chip. Export and a local copy belong in an honest relationship with software.
Take a copy of your work
Your data, on your side
Understand your own habits and your own time. No advertising profiles built from your work.
Your history can help you decide what to do next. It belongs in your hands.
There is a purpose for statistics here: helping you understand the work you recorded and choose what matters to you. We do not want a focus app to quietly acquire a second purpose as a way to sell access to your attention.
Our approach to privacy03 / A better use of human ingenuity
We want to spend our effort building useful things: clearer interfaces, better tools and software people can rely on. We don’t want to spend it inventing another way to pressure someone into a purchase or keep them from leaving.
As our tools improve, we want the benefits to reach the people using our apps: more capability, less friction and a fairer price. That is our idea of progress.
A difficult market does not give a company ownership of the customer’s attention. We want to be able to explain where our effort goes and why the result is useful to the person who pays for it.
04 / Your right to a little peace
If you need our apps, use them. If you don’t, we will respect that.
We won’t chase you across the internet with ads, flood your inbox with marketing emails or sell your personal data.
Your attention belongs to your life.
We believe people can step out of the attention machine and take back control of their time, their choices and their data. We want to help build that change.
Perhaps you finished your work. Perhaps you went outside. Perhaps somebody in the room deserved your attention more than an app did. For a tool designed to help you live, those are perfectly good outcomes.
Read the full argument
05 / The useful parts, from the start
Your colours. Advanced stats. API access. MCP. Integrations.
Change the colours, explore the detailed statistics, connect an assistant through MCP or build with the API. These capabilities are available from the start. No subscription, no premium tier and no upgrade buttons.
Local features are free. Hosted services, including API and MCP usage, draw from your prepaid chips; you do not need a subscription to unlock access.
06 / The fair deal
Use the apps locally for free. When you want your devices to stay in sync, cloud sync costs one cent a day.
30¢ for 30 days USD · $0.01 a day
You choose when to top up.
Try the online services with welcome chips. Create an account and confirm your email to receive a one-time welcome bonus. See whether the service suits you before you decide to top up.
Top up one shared wallet and use your chips across Fair Ninja. All our apps use the same balance.
Tomato Future appsA whole family of tools. One balance.
We want to earn money by running useful services at a price you can understand. We believe that can be enough.
Chips are prepaid service credit. One balance is a shared way to pay; other hosted services have their own usage rates. Service details
07 / Give something useful
When you recommend a tool, you put a little of your own reputation behind it. A gift should leave the other person free to use it, or not.
Stay a little longer / From the blog
Principles deserve more than a headline.
We have written about the choices behind this company: the evidence, the limits of that evidence, and the responsibilities we believe a software business has. These are full essays. Take your time.
Visit the Fair Ninja blogWhat happens when an interface makes saying no harder? Experiments, subscription payment data and a cancellation settlement help us examine the difference between choosing to stay and failing to get out.
Experiments · Payment data · An ethical choiceSoftware companies choose where to put their money and talent. We look at financial reports, the economics of competing to be heard and the cost that never appears on a campaign dashboard.
Financial reports · Advertising incentives · Human ingenuityWhat is a notification asking of you? Why we reject advertising harassment and the sale of personal data, and why putting an app down can be a perfectly good outcome.
Attention research · Data practices · The freedom to say no08 / Start with something useful
We’re starting with Tomato: a focus app with tasks, useful stats and room for your own workflow.
Choose what matters now. Make a little room for it.
Meet TomatoOur first app · in beta
Next: Habit, Todo, Board. The same principles, one useful tool at a time.On the horizon. Tomato comes first.
A few straight answers
No. Running a useful service has real recurring costs. We object to deliberately profiting from forgotten cancellations, hiding the exit and turning someone’s own work into a reason they cannot leave.
A chip is prepaid credit for Fair Ninja’s hosted services. All our apps use the same wallet. You choose when to top up; there is no default automatic top-up. Local use is free.
No. Start locally without an account. Your first visit needs a connection to load the app; offline use depends on the app being available on your device. Tomato’s page explains its local storage and offline behaviour.
Read about local useYes. Your account export brings together the data from all spaces you can access, across Fair Ninja, in one ZIP. You can also export locally from an individual app: Tomato saves its current workspace as JSONL and can export focus sessions as CSV. Keep your own copy and take it with you.
Export all your spaces Export from TomatoYes. Tomato accepts an account ZIP or an app JSON/JSONL backup, and shows a preview before adding supported Tomato records. It does not recreate the whole account or the original set of spaces; unsupported data is shown as skipped.
Local import is free. Importing into your signed-in account uses prepaid chips, with an estimated cost shown before you confirm.
More about export and importMore freedom. Fewer things to keep an eye on.
A little more control over your tools.
A little less of your life spent managing them.
Free local tools. Optional services. Your choice.