The studio
An independent studio, built for reliability.
We build and operate software that has to stay up, stay correct, and keep your data where you expect it. That's the whole brief, and it's why the studio is shaped the way it is.
Red Bead is small on purpose. You'll email a person, and whoever built the product gets the alert when it breaks.
We operate under EU law and store product data in EU regions, because the people who use our software need to know where their data lives.
Diffuso, our first product, is in private beta, and the next one is in the workshop.
Where the name comes from
Deming's red bead experiment.
Willing workers were handed a paddle and a bin of white and red beads. Red beads counted as defects. Workers were praised, coached and threatened; the red beads kept coming, because they were in the bin the whole time.
We took the name because it points at the encouraging half of that lesson: if the defects come from the system, the system is the thing you get to change. Most of our work is changing the bin.
Try the experiment on the home pageValues, and what each one costs us
No poster versionA value you've never paid for is only a preference. So each of these comes with its price attached.
Say what's true
Including when it's inconvenient: that a feature isn't ready, that a date has slipped, that something we shipped doesn't work yet.
What it costs usWe don't claim numbers we can't show you, so our product pages sometimes say less than they could.
Do the boring work
Runbooks, retries, restores, migrations rehearsed before they run. The unglamorous half is the half that decides whether the software survives.
What it costs usOur releases take longer than they would if we cut corners.
Stay small
No support queue between you and the code. We design, build and run each product ourselves.
What it costs usWe take on one product at a time, so the list on this site grows slowly.
Your data is yours
Product data is stored in EU regions, exportable in a format you can read, deletable when you ask. Leaving should be boring.
What it costs usWe build and maintain the export path even though almost nobody uses it.
Fix systems, not people
Incidents get a cause, not a culprit. Names appear in our write-ups only where credit is due.
What it costs usAn incident write-up takes longer, because finding a cause is slower than naming a person.
The company
The paperwork, without the padding.
Listed in the Estonian Commercial Register, with its registered address at Sepapaja tn 6, 15551 Tallinn, Estonia. Not VAT-registered.
Something to ask us?
Write to us about our products, a partnership, press, or the company itself.
office@redbeadstudio.comElsewhere