Why Shridha exists

Shridha is an engineering studio. We build web, mobile and cloud products for clients, using AI-assisted engineering, automated tests and CI/CD, and you can see some of that on our work page. Alongside that, we make our own apps, free for anyone to use. This post is about those apps and why we make them. Both come from the same place: we like building software that is carefully made and that people can rely on.

Most people who use software for ordinary jobs have met the same three problems. A free plan gets smaller every year. Ads and trackers creep in. Or a tool that should take ten seconds asks you to make an account first.

Our free apps are an answer to that. They are small, useful, free to use, private by default and have no ads. They are for developers, builders and small business owners, and for small businesses in India first, because that is where we saw the biggest gap between what people need and what is free.

What we have built so far#

The full list lives in the Shridha apps catalog. A few examples:

• Tools: loan, tax and GST calculators, image and PDF tools, QR codes and developer utilities, all running in your browser.
• Invoice Maker: GST invoices, quotes and bills of supply as PDFs, with your details kept on your own device.
• Panchang: tithi, nakshatra and festivals for Indian cities, in Hindi and English.
• typeflow: a typing test that shows which keys slowed you down.
• Gupt: send a password or secret that opens only once.
• Smaran Ghanti: a mala counter and reminders for daily naam jap.

The rules we build by#

Free stays free. If an app is free today, we do not move its core features behind a paywall later. We would rather build fewer things than break that.

Private by default. Where we can, the work happens in your browser, so your files and numbers never reach us. No ads, and no tracking tools.

Accounts are optional. An account is offered only when it gives you something real, such as saving your results, and the app works without one.

Cheap to run, so the promise is affordable. We use static hosting and pay-per-use services, so an app that nobody is using costs close to nothing. That is what makes the first rule possible. We wrote more about this in why Shridha has no ads.

One exception, stated plainly. Bosswala, our attendance and leads app for Indian shops, charges a small fee to cover what it costs to run. It is listed in the catalog with that difference clear.

What this blog is for#

It covers the studio and the apps. Two kinds of post. The journey: what we decided, what we dropped, and why. And docs: how things are built and how they work, written for people who want to check our claims rather than trust them. The next post, how Tools works on your files without uploading them, is the first of those.

If there is an everyday job you wish had a free, private tool, tell us.