Alexandria, Louisiana.
Around the turn of the millennium, somebody needed a name for a new idea: run the software on their computers, charge you every month to reach it. They called it Software as a Service. SaaS. The name did more work than the code did. It built a trillion-dollar category, and it renamed renting so smoothly that nobody noticed the deal underneath: you pay forever, and you never own a thing.
The opposite never got a name.
Owning your software isn't a new idea — and neither is the phrase “owned software.” I'm not going to pretend either one is. Perpetual licenses. On-premise. Self-hosted. 37signals built ONCE, pay-once self-hosted apps, and said the subscription era went too far. All smart, all circling it for years. But every one of those names describes how you paid or where it runs. Not one names the thing an owner actually cares about: what do you HAVE when the dust settles? SaaS got a name that sells itself. The opposite got IT terminology. That's the whole gap.
The name is owned software. The standard is what was missing.
Owned software is business software the business owns outright: the code and the data. The business can keep running it, change it, or hand it to another builder without the original vendor's permission. If the software company disappears tomorrow, the software is still there, still running, still the owner's property.
SaaS = rented software. Owned software = the opposite.
That's the whole category, and notice what it doesn't say. It doesn't say who built it or how. Any builder can make owned software, and more of them should. The way we build it: fitted to one business the way a suit is cut to one body, old records migrated in instead of abandoned, running beside the system it replaces until the numbers match and the owner says go. That's our version. The ownership is the category.
One question tells you which one you have. If you stop paying, what's left? Rented: maybe an export of your records, if you moved fast. The working system? Gone. Owned: everything. Still yours. Still running.
The category is bigger than us.
It's already emerging, in versions. 37signals' ONCE apps, run on your own server: the mass-produced version. The open-source and self-hosted world has carried the flag for decades: the build-it-from-parts version. We build the bespoke version, one business at a time. Different builders, different methods, one shift: businesses deciding they should own the software they run on. The term is starting to emerge across the industry, and good — a category gets more useful when more than one builder can qualify under it. Our job isn't to own the words. It's to make the standard clear, and to build the bespoke version well enough that businesses like yours can finally buy it.
And owned doesn't mean "no fees ever." There's a monthly, and it buys work: hosting, nightly backups, support you can call, new features as the business grows. Stop paying and the work stops. Not your software. That's the whole difference, and it's the difference the word service was invented to blur.
Why now and not twenty years ago.
Because for most established small businesses, serious custom software has always meant a big upfront project, months of building, and risk the owner couldn't justify. Renting was the only door a shop, a nursery, or a roofing crew could afford. The name matters now because AI changed the economics. Software built for one business and owned by it now ships at the monthly a business already pays for rented seats, and a category only gets its name once normal businesses can actually buy it.
It's already running.
That's a roofer's owned system auditing his own books the day it went live. Real Louisiana businesses run on software they own, right now. The code and the data.
Nobody rents you your own business back.