Quiet infrastructure for independent projects. Built by two people who care about privacy, because we care about our own.

The Problem

The internet was supposed to make it easier to make things and share them with people who cared. In a lot of ways, it did.

Then the platforms showed up.

Now your blog lives on infrastructure owned by a company that sells ads against it. Your newsletter list is an asset on someone else’s balance sheet. Your podcast is hosted by a platform that was acquired twice in four years and may not exist in its current form by the time you read this. Your files are stored somewhere enormous and opaque, indexed by systems you’ll never see, subject to terms of service that change whenever it’s convenient.

The tools got better. The ownership got worse.

Most platforms aren’t selling you software. They’re selling you — your attention, your content, your behavioral data, your audience — to advertisers and data brokers. That’s the business model. It always was: You’re not the customer. You’re the inventory.

There’s Another Way

Skeleton Works is a managed platform for people who want to run their own tools without running their own servers and who do not want their identity’s, data, and personal information sold and mined for profit.

That’s just gross.

With Skeleton Works, you get real software — databases, publishing tools, email lists, file storage, automation — hosted on infrastructure that belongs to your project alone. We manage it. You own it. Nobody else is in the room.

No ads. No tracking. No algorithmic pressure to perform. No terms of service with a clause about “improving our services” that means something you didn’t agree to.

Just tools that work, run by people who want the same things you do.

What’s Included

A curated set of tools chosen for durability and ownership, such as:

  • WordPress — publishing and site management
  • Listmonk — self-hosted mailing lists and newsletters
  • Castopod — podcast hosting and distribution
  • Vaultwarden — password and credential management
  • Node-RED — automation and workflow tooling
  • Appsmith — low-code internal dashboards
  • MariaDB, PostgreSQL, MongoDB — managed databases
  • MinIO — object storage for files and backups

You use what you need. The rest sits there quietly.

Why Skeleton Works

We’re a two-person company. We’re not backed by venture capital. We don’t have a growth target. We have a hosting bill and a belief that small, honest businesses are worth building.

We know what it’s like to be small. We know what it’s like to feel anonymous — like a user ID in someone else’s database, like your account is a row in a spreadsheet being optimized around without your knowledge. We’ve used the same platforms you’re tired of. We’ve read the same terms of service updates that quietly took something away.

We built Skeleton Works because we wanted something like it to exist. We wanted infrastructure with a human being behind it — someone with a name, someone you can reach, someone who has skin in the game.

When something breaks, we fix it. When you have a question, we answer it. There’s no ticket queue routing you to a bot. There’s no support tier you have to upgrade into to talk to a person.

We’re a small business, just like a lot of the people we serve. We have bills. We have projects of our own. We know what it means to put work into something and want it to last.

That’s who’s running this.

On Privacy

Your data is yours. Not “mostly” yours. Not yours with “exceptions.” Yours. Period.

It lives on infrastructure dedicated to your project. It is not pooled with other customers’ data. It is not analyzed. It is not sold. It is not handed to advertisers, because we don’t have advertisers. It is not shared with data brokers. It is not used to build profiles, infer behavior, or generate revenue in any way other than the subscription you pay.

Your data is not used to train AI systems. Not ours. Not anyone else’s. Not ever.

We want to be direct about this because it matters and because a lot of companies are being slippery about it right now. When you write something, record something, store something, or send something through Skeleton Works, that content belongs to you. It doesn’t become a training example. It doesn’t get fed into a model. It doesn’t quietly improve a product you didn’t ask to improve.

We’re a two-person company. We value our own privacy. We have our own data we don’t want harvested, monetized, or used without our knowledge. We extend exactly that standard to everyone who trusts us with their work.

This isn’t a policy we drafted to satisfy a lawyer. It’s just how we operate.

What We’re Not

  • A growth platform
  • A marketing engine
  • A data broker wearing a SaaS costume
  • A company that will quietly change its terms when it gets acquired

You can keep using Gmail (though we do affiliate with Proton for secure mail, and we hope you’ll use them through us). You can bring your own domain. You can leave whenever you want — your data leaves with you.

Skeleton Works doesn’t trap you. It supports you.

Right Now

Skeleton Works is in early access. We’re small, deliberate, and not in a hurry to be anything else.

If you’re building something thoughtful and want infrastructure that shares those values — you’re in the right place.