I never wanted to be ultra-rich. I have a good enough job that pays my bills and leaves enough money and time for hobbies. I made hundreds of free projects just because I like writing code. So, Firefly Zero, despite being an officially registered business, was never about getting rich. It’s about making the world a better place.
And when your goal not getting rich but doing good, when you serve your users instead of selling them, you do things differently. Suddenly, it becomes not about features that you have but the features that you don’t. So, I present to you…
Things that Firefly Zero doesn’t have (and never will)
- No ads
- No marketing or paid promotions
- No subscriptions
- No microtransactions
- No hidden costs
- No DRM
- No NFTs
- No cryptocurrencies or crypto miners
- No LLMs or GenAI
- No AI-generated code, text or art
- No cookie banners
- No user tracking or data collection
- No residential proxies
- No always-online internet connection
- No investors to appeal
- No business incubators
- No proprietary code
- No forced updates
- No NVIDIA chips
- No “opening device voids your warranty” stickers
- No “move fast and break things” culture
How
- We have our daily jobs and make Firefly Zero in our free time.
- We pay for everything (PCBs and components for prototypes, tools, merch, travel to conferences) ourselves.
- We plan to raise money for the first batch of devices using pre-orders. It won’t be typical kickstarter where startups sell you pretty pictures of products that they don’t have. No, it will be a chance to buy something that we already know we can and will produce.
- The device itself will be very old-school. The games you buy you own (and can download and keep as a regular file). Installation of games and updates can be done over Wi-Fi but that’s all internet is used for (multiplayer is fully local).
- Everything is open-source and we encourage you to hack things
Maybe we won’t make as much money from the project as we potentially could but we know that we’ll be proud of our choices. Even if we sell Firefly Zero to a handful of people, we’ll know that we made life a little bit better for them. And that’s what happy life is about.