What happens if Crads AI goes away

The honest answer to "what if you pick up another job", and why the self-hosted shape makes it survivable.

The first serious objection I got to this whole thing was not about the software. It was: what happens if you pick up another job, or decide this isn't something you want to do any more.

It is the right question, it was asked by someone whose members would have been the ones affected, and the answer cannot be "don't worry". So here it is properly. It is also the question that shaped the September 2026 redesign, and the answer got materially better because of it.

What I am#

One person. Samuel Davis, trading as Crads AI, in Sydney. Not a company with a board and a runway, and I am not going to dress it up as one. That is the actual risk you are weighing, and no architecture makes a sole operator into an institution.

What architecture can do is make the risk survivable rather than fatal, which is a different and achievable thing. Most software fails badly when its vendor disappears, because the vendor holds the thing you actually needed. This is now built so that I hold nothing.

Why this survives me#

Your machine is yours, all the way down. Your mineral runs on a server in your own hosting account (Hetzner or DigitalOcean), billed to you, opened only by your own keys. You did not take the box from me; you built it, so there is no sense in which you need to take the box back if I vanish. It keeps running, keeps its schedule, keeps answering you.

Your brain is files, not a database row. Your pages are markdown in a git repository, on that machine, mirrored to a repository in your own GitHub account every night. If Crads AI stopped existing tonight, you would still have every page, readable in any text editor, on infrastructure I have no access to. There is no export step, because there is no store of mine to export from. The Download a copy now button on the Backup card exists anyway, and works with nothing of mine involved.

Nothing routes through me at runtime. There is no Crads AI account, no directory, no billing, no tunnel, no service in the path between you and your assistant. Your assistant is your Claude account talking to your files on your machine. If every piece of my infrastructure went dark tonight, nothing you use tomorrow would notice.

The software is headed into the open. Crads-AI is free, and the code is being prepared for a public open-source release. Once it lands, the last remaining dependency on me (new software, fixes for the connectors that rot when Google or Microsoft change something) becomes something anyone can pick up: you, someone you hire, or whoever cares enough.

What you would actually lose#

I would rather be specific than reassuring.

  • Updates and fixes stop, until and unless someone else picks the code up. Your mineral keeps running the software it has. What rots over months is the world moving: a provider changes an API and nobody ships the fix.
  • Support ends. Anything on your box that breaks in a way you cannot fix yourself stays broken unless you or someone you hire picks it up. It is ordinary Linux, node and markdown, so that is a real option rather than a theoretical one.
  • Me. The judgement, the docs staying current, the person to ask. That is the one part with no mitigation, and pretending otherwise would be marketing.

What I will do if I stop#

Committing to this in writing is the only part of this page that is a promise rather than a description:

  1. Notice, not silence. If I wind this down deliberately, everyone running a mineral I know about gets told, with a stated date, not left to notice the updates stopped.
  2. The code goes public first, if it somehow is not already, so that anyone can keep their machine maintained.
  3. The docs stay up long enough to outlive the transition, and this page is updated to say plainly what has changed.

What I cannot promise#

I cannot promise the project continues. I cannot promise that if I am hit by a bus tomorrow, the orderly version above happens rather than the abrupt one: it is one person and there is no second operator today. That is why the design sections matter more than the promise section. The design is the guarantee; my intentions are only the improvement on it.

One thing IS yours to do, today, and it is the difference between "survivable" and "survived": back up your mineral has the one step only you can do. Do it this week, not the week you need it.