What TFL Stands For
By Rob Chipman
Tiny Forest Labs started as a place to ship one thing. One product, one page, one focus. That made sense at the time. It doesn't anymore.
In the last few weeks it became clear TFL is a studio. AxiomWeaver is in alpha. A home app called Attic is weeks from the App Store. Last week I built a daily puzzle game in an afternoon and put it live at /fault. Three different things, and they all run through the same filter.
This post is about that filter, because it finally has words.
The promise
No tracking. No price gouging. No subscriptions unless the subscription pays for something real.
That's it. That's the test every TFL product has to pass.
Attic won't track you. AxiomWeaver won't track you. The Fault puzzle doesn't know you exist beyond whatever your own browser remembers. There is no analytics dashboard somewhere with your behavior on it, and there never will be. "TFL doesn't track you" isn't a line buried in a privacy policy. It's the first thing I decide and the last thing I'd trade.
On pricing, the rule is just as plain. A subscription is honest when the product costs money to run every month. Cloud sync costs money to run. A platform that serves your world to readers costs money to run. Those can carry a monthly fee, because the cost is real and ongoing. A writing tool that lives on your own machine has no ongoing cost, so it doesn't get a subscription. You buy it, you own it.
AxiomWeaver is going one-time
$29.99. Once. Yours.
The subscription is going away for the base tool. Buy AxiomWeaver, own it, no monthly bill and no renewal. Big new capabilities down the road, things like maps and the reader platform, will ship as optional expansions you buy if they're useful to you and skip if they aren't. If you've played an MMO you already understand the model.
The reader platform will be the one exception, when it ships, because it runs real infrastructure to serve your world to actual readers. You'll pay for that when you want it. Not before.
One more thing on AxiomWeaver: the name is changing. It always explained itself too hard. The next release renames it Understory, which is the layer of a forest that grows beneath the canopy, hidden and alive and holding the whole thing up. That's what the tool is for the writer. The current alpha still ships under the old name, so I'm not going to make a big announcement until the rename is actually in your hands. But that's where it's headed.
Attic
Same philosophy, a completely different problem.
Attic is for homeowners who want a record of their house: rooms, items, paint colors, appliance model numbers, the systems that keep the place running, all the things you wish the previous owner had left you. Free to download. A one-time unlock for the full inventory. A Share subscription only if you want cloud sync and a partner on the same home. It's nearly done. More on Attic here.
Fault
The puzzle was an experiment, and the experiment was as much about how it got made as what it is.
You read a short story told in three beats. Somewhere across them there's a continuity error, a detail that quietly contradicts something established earlier. Find where the story breaks, pick the sentence, then new information arrives and you decide whether to hold your answer or switch. Four minutes, free, no account. Go play it.
I gave the brief and the constraints and pushed back on the parts that were wrong. The team did the rest. Here's the full story of how Fault was made, because that process is the thing I keep thinking about.
What it adds up to
TFL makes tools worth using and games worth playing. Not many of them. Considered ones. Priced honestly, built without surveillance, shipped when they're ready and not a day before.
That's the studio. That's what this site is now.
If you've been following AxiomWeaver, the Discord is where things happen. If you're new, the origin story is a good place to start.
-- Rob