Say the number
Latency, uptime and price are published with the measurement method beside them. A figure without a window is marketing, and we would rather cut the sentence than print one.
Company
A software company that runs what it builds.
Two competences held on purpose: knowing how to operate software properly, and knowing how to deal with the people using it. Most companies are good at one and outsource the other.
Software is usually built by one company and operated by another, and the seam between them is where everybody’s bad week comes from.
Shardly refuses the seam. We write the software, we run it on hardware we own, and the person who answers a question about it is the person who wrote it. It is more work and much less leverage, and it is the only way to answer “why is this behaving like that?” with an explanation rather than a ticket to a third party.
That decision sets everything downstream. Because we run what we write, an edge case becomes a commit rather than a feature request. Because we own the hardware underneath it, we can publish real specifications instead of numbers that mean nothing. And because nobody outside the company needs a return on their capital, none of it has to answer to anyone but the people paying us.
2025
Building since March
0
Job titles
0
Outside investors
01What we do
Four decisions that make up the whole company.
Shardly is a small business with a short list of convictions. Everything the platform does is downstream of these four.
We write the software
Products, tooling, control planes and the unglamorous parts in between. Everything the company sells was written here, by people who are still in the building when it misbehaves.
We run it ourselves
On hardware we bought and racked, in three German facilities. Operating what you build is the fastest feedback loop there is: the on-call rota is the code review nobody can skip.
We talk to people ourselves
No support tier, no script, no outsourced first line. The person who wrote a subsystem answers the question about it, which is slower per ticket and much faster per problem.
We keep the data in the EU
Customer workloads, backups and logs stay inside the European Union. GDPR is the design constraint the platform was built around, not a page in the terms.
02Principles
Six rules we hold to when they are inconvenient.
Principles are only worth writing down when they cost something. Each of these has, at least once.
Small on purpose
Headcount is the easiest thing to add and the hardest to undo. The team stays small enough that the person who wrote the subsystem is the person who answers the ticket about it.
Boring where it counts
Billing, backups and identity are deliberately unexciting and heavily tested. Novelty is spent on the parts customers can see, never on the parts that must not lose data.
No lock-in as a feature
Files stay downloadable, configuration stays exportable, and cancellation takes one click. A customer who stays because leaving is hard is one we have already lost.
Answer as the person who built it
Support is not a separate department reading from a script. Tickets land with the people who wrote the subsystem the ticket is about.
Grow slower than the revenue
Every machine is paid for out of what the business earns. It is a slower way to expand and a much simpler way to decide what gets built next.
03How decisions get made
There is no CEO here, and no head of anything.
One structure, and it fits in a sentence: everything is proposed, argued and voted on, one vote per person, with a founder's veto that is meant to be expensive to use.
No titles
Nobody has one — not on a card, not in a signature, not in this paragraph. A title is a claim about whose opinion counts before the argument has happened, and we would rather have the argument.
One vote each
Hardware, pricing, what to build next, whether to take a meeting. Anyone proposes, everyone votes, the tally is written down. Seniority does not weight a vote and neither does having been right last time.
One veto
Somebody carries the legal and financial responsibility, and that person can overrule a vote. It has been used once, and every use is published — a veto nobody can count is just a rumour about who is really in charge.
The voting record
Five decisions that shaped the company, and how the room actually split on each one.
- 01
Buy the machines instead of renting them
2025 · Q2Carried3 for1 against0 abstained
The one against was about cash, and was right about the cash.
- 02
End the investor conversation
2025 · Q3Carried4 for0 against1 abstained
The abstention wanted to hear the second meeting first.
- 03
Shorten the billing cycle to a week
2025 · Q3Carried3 for2 against0 abstained
Closest vote we have had. Revenue predictability was the argument against.
- 04
Publish the bad month
2026 · Q1Carried4 for1 against0 abstained
We lost a customer that week. The vote would go the same way again.
- 05
Start a second project before the first was comfortable
2026 · Q2Vetoed3 for2 against0 abstained
Carried on the vote, overridden by the founder. Revisited a quarter later and started properly.
- 06
Write our own control plane rather than license one
2025 · Q2Carried4 for1 against0 abstained
Two engineering quarters. The vote against was about the opportunity cost and it was not wrong.
- 07
Open a third site
2026 · Q1Carried5 for0 against0 abstained
The only unanimous one. Backups sharing a building with the thing they protect had been bothering everybody.
- 08
Never work with recruitment agencies
2026 · Q1Carried4 for0 against1 abstained
The abstention pointed out we have never hired anybody, which was fair.
- 09
Split the company site from the product
2026 · Q3Carried3 for1 against1 abstained
The vote against thought it was vanity. Partly it was.
- 10
Put the voting record on the public site
2026 · Q3Carried4 for1 against0 abstained
You are reading the result. The argument against was that we would have to keep doing it.
Why publish this at all? Every company claims to be flat until you ask who decided something. A tally is the only version of that claim anybody can check.
04History
From one cabinet to three regions.
Shardly has been building since 16 March 2025. Nothing here was announced before it was running.
2025Q1
The first rack
Shardly starts as a private answer to an ordinary annoyance: software shipped by people who never had to run it, and infrastructure sold by people who never had to talk to whoever was using it. The first machines go into a Falkenstein cabinet.
2025Q2
The control plane replaces the panel
The off-the-shelf panel is retired in favour of a dashboard written in-house: a real file editor, per-shard logs, and a deploy path that does not involve an SFTP client.
2025Q3
Weekly billing goes live
Billing moves from a monthly cycle to a weekly one, with extra capacity sold in transparent packs. Cancellation becomes a one-click operation with no retention flow behind it.
2025Q4
Frankfurt comes online
A second region opens beside Discord's European gateway, cutting the round trip for latency-sensitive workloads and giving backups somewhere other than their own building to live.
2026Q2
Nuremberg and the backup vault
A third site adds capacity and an offsite vault, completing a three-region footprint entirely inside Germany.
2026Q3
Shardly HQ
The corporate identity separates from the platform. shardlyhq.xyz becomes the company's front door for press, partners and anyone who needs to know who is behind the machines.
05Company facts
The details, without the adjectives.
Compute + gateway edge
Compute + object storage
Compute + backup vault
Writing about us, or working with us?
Press is answered within one business day and partnership enquiries within two. Everything reaches the same small team, which is the point.