Why I Built Sloom Studio

By Jarrod Cary, the person who wrote all of it. Sloom Software.

The subscription tax

I've paid it for years, like most people who make things on a computer. A few dollars a month here for a paint app, a few there for a layout tool, another line for a video editor, and if I wanted to touch any of the newer AI tooling, another subscription on top of that. None of those charges is enormous by itself. Added up, forever, for tools I already own a computer capable of running, it started to feel less like a fair trade and more like a toll booth I'd agreed to walk through every month for the rest of my life. I don't want to rent the pencil. I wanted to buy it once and keep it.

Building it alone

I'm a solo developer. There's no studio behind Sloom Studio, no investors, no roadmap set by a committee. It's one person deciding what a creative suite should look like if it didn't have to answer to a subscription dashboard or a growth target. That has a real upside: I can just build the thing I think is right, without a meeting about it. It also has a real cost: I'm also the only QA department, the only support inbox, and the only person who fixes the bug you just found. I say that plainly because it's true, not because it's a pitch. If you buy this, you're buying something one person built, and one person stands behind.

Local-first, on purpose

The app has no user accounts and no telemetry, and that isn't a bullet point I added to the marketing page, it's the actual design. Your projects are files on your disk, in the app's own .sloom format. If Sloom Software vanished tomorrow, the files you already made would still open, because the app was never built to need a server to function. The only time anything leaves your machine is if you deliberately turn on the optional Flow graph and add your own API key for an AI provider, and even then it's your prompt going to the provider you chose, not to me. I think that's how creative software should work by default, not as a premium feature.

One project file, four workspaces

The actual reason the suite is one app instead of four separate ones is a boring, practical complaint I had for years: export a PNG out of one program, import it into another, lose the layers, and start over the moment something needs to change. So Image, Paper, Video, and the optional Flow graph all read and write the same .sloom project and the same shared source library. Draw something in Image and it's already sitting in Paper's library when you go to letter a page. Cut a clip in Video and the same source assets are right there too. That's the whole case for "one suite": not that any single workspace is the best tool in the world at its one job, but that none of them make you leave the project to do the next step.

Why there's a free Community edition

The free tier isn't a trial and it isn't a demo. It doesn't expire, it doesn't watermark your work, and it isn't missing a workspace. What it doesn't include is the professional print-production pipeline, the part that comic and book creators use when they're actually publishing for money. That felt like the honest line to draw: if you're drawing for yourself, learning, or making something you're not selling, I'd rather you just use the app. If you're running a business on it, a one-time license fee to keep that business going seems fair to ask, once, not every month.

The source is public. That's a narrower promise than it sounds.

The code lives on GitHub because I think that's the more trustworthy way to ship software you're eventually asking people to pay for: you can read it, build it yourself, and check that it isn't doing anything shady with your files. It's licensed for noncommercial use under PolyForm Noncommercial, which is a real, specific, source-available license, not a permissive one. I'd rather say that plainly than let anyone assume otherwise just because the repository happens to be public.

Where that leaves things

I shipped the first public builds not long ago, and it's still moving fast, still pre-1.0, still one person's judgment calls all the way down. If any of the above sounds like your problem too, the 17-minute walkthrough shows the whole thing end to end, and the free download is on the home page. If you just want to tell me I got something wrong, or right, support@sloom.studio reaches me directly.