If we disappear, it keeps working.

What usually goes wrong

The pattern is consistent enough to be predictable. A small hardware company builds a connected display. It needs an account, an app, and a company server that assembles the data and pushes it to the device. That architecture is easier to build and it enables nice features.

Then the company is acquired, or runs out of money, or simply decides manufacturing isn't worth it. The server goes quiet. Every device that depended on it stops showing anything — not because the hardware failed, but because the hardware was never allowed to work alone. This has happened in this exact product category, to a company far better funded than we are, and the owners had to write their own replacement software to keep their devices alive.

What we did differently

Three decisions, all made at the start, all of which cost us features we'd otherwise have shipped.

No account

There is no Tickrix sign-up, so there is no login to be disabled, no password database to be breached, and no user record to be sold with the company's assets. Your device is identified by the ID printed on its own screen.

The price path doesn't run through us

Your device talks to the exchange you chose. We are not a middleman in the data, which is also why you can point it at a custom API endpoint and cut us out entirely if you'd rather.

Firmware gets published if we stop

If Tickrix ceases trading, we publish the device firmware so it can be maintained, patched and repurposed without us. That is a commitment we are making in writing on a public page, because a promise you can't point at later isn't worth much.

What this does not promise

We're not claiming immortality. Exchanges change their APIs, and if a provider your device depends on shuts down its public endpoint, that particular data source stops working — that's true of any price display, including ours. The custom API option exists partly for this reason.

We're also not promising indefinite support. If the company ends, so does the support, and it becomes a device you or someone else maintains. The commitment is that this is possible, which is more than most of this category can say.

Why we bother saying it

Because you are being asked to spend real money with a small company you had not heard of last week, on a thing you cannot pick up and hold first. The honest way to handle that is not to pretend we're bigger than we are. It is to explain what happens in the bad case, before you pay, and then hold to it.