I got tired of renting software, so I started building my own.

For eight years my job was quality and operations at manufacturing companies around here. You spend that long finding the ways a product fails before a customer does, and it changes how you look at everything, including the software on your own computer.

On the side, my wife and I ran an online shop, and later she started a marketing business. Both ran on a stack of subscriptions. Some months we used a tool every day. Some months we opened it twice. The bill was the same either way, and cancelling meant losing access to our own files. That trade never sat right with me.

So I started making the tools I wanted to own. MadSync turns a song into a music video, with the edits landing on the beat and the lyrics timed to the vocal. MadPeel cuts the background out of product photos. MadCapture records just the part of your screen that matters. MadCrawl finds the technical SEO problems on a website. They run on your own Windows PC, they work offline, and your files stay where they already are.

When you buy one of the program. You pay once. Most programs have a free demo or a free version, so you can see it do the job before you spend anything. I sell only through madfable.com. The installers are signed under my legal name, so Windows shows you who made it. And when you email support, you get me, the person who wrote the code.

The QA habit stuck. Every release comes with notes on what actually changed, bugs included, on the What's New page.

Bought, not borrowed.