Vol. I · No. 1Eighteen programs · In the press for 2026Thousand Oaks, California · Est. MMXXVI
Eighteen programs. One standard.
Ardenholt is a holding company for small software — a house that publishes titles rather than a startup defending a single product. We commission narrow, finished tools for the ordinary hard parts of a life: quitting the vape, ordering a parent's paperwork before it is needed, surviving the layoff, getting the puppy to sleep.
Eighteen are in the press for 2026, built by one founder and Atlas — the company's own AI operating system. Most are bought once. None carries an advertisement. Your entries stay on the device in your hand.
Every entry below is real, named, priced and scheduled. Select an entry to read its record. The register will be sold from this address when it opens; nothing has shipped yet, and we would rather say so than imply otherwise.
Prices set in verdigris are the only figures on this page that ask anything of you.
§ II
House articles
The Ardenholt Standard
Seven articles govern every program this company owns. They are not marketing positions. They are the terms on which a product is allowed to carry the name.
I
Pay once.
A price is a promise, and a promise you renew every month is a rental. Where a product has no ongoing cost to run, you buy it once and it is yours. Subscription is the default of the industry because it is the default of the spreadsheet, not because it is better for you.
Exhale is $24.99. Day One is $19.99. In Case is $59. That is the whole transaction. Where a subscription is genuinely earned — a service that syncs, staffs or stores on our side — we print the monthly number plainly and keep it small.
9 priced once · 1 free · 2 subscriptions · 6 still to publishII
No advertising.
Not a banner, not a sponsored row, not an interstitial before your own data. An advertisement is a second customer sitting in the room, and every design decision made after that one is made against you.
This is the article we expect to be tested on. It is not a launch promise with an expiry date; it is the reason the price exists at all.
All 18 programs · no ad unitsIII
Your data stays put.
The people who use these programs are counting sober days, logging symptoms, and writing down what happens to their family if they die. That is not analytics feedstock. It belongs on the device in their hand.
We design for on-device storage first and treat every byte that leaves the phone as something we have to justify — the exception, never the architecture.
On-device by defaultIV
One job, done completely.
A small program that finishes its job beats a platform that grows forever. Each product is scoped to a single task, built to open instantly, and then left alone — maintained, not inflated.
Growth at Ardenholt means another program, never a heavier one. That restraint is what makes every other article on this page affordable to keep.
Small, fast, finishedV
The account is optional.
Buy once, keep forever. Every Ardenholt program works completely without an account — no sign-up wall, no email to verify, nothing standing between you and the thing you paid for. Most software asks for an identity before it will open; ours opens.
If you would rather not keep track of eighteen separate receipts, one Ardenholt account can hold your licences across every program in the register. That is the only job it has. It is a convenience offered, never a condition of use, and never a way to make a purchase behave like a rental.
When the first programs ship, the register will be sold here at ardenholt.com — one counter, one checkout, bundles where they honestly save you money. Nothing is for sale today.
Optional account · One place for your licencesVI
The guarantee
Thirty days, money back, no reasons needed.
Every program, every platform, thirty days from the day you buy. You do not have to explain yourself, you do not have to talk to anyone, and you will not be walked through three retention offers on the way out. One request, one refund.
A company with no customers yet cannot show you testimonials, and will not invent them. What it can show you is the terms it is willing to be held to before it has taken a single dollar. This is the one that costs us something.
30 days · Every program · Every platform
VII
Free to download. Free to keep.
Every Ardenholt program is free to download and opens as the whole program — a full seven-day trial, not a crippled preview with the useful parts greyed out. When the trial ends, a free core remains, and it stays useful for as long as you keep the app.
Whatever you have written stays yours whether you ever pay or not: on your device, viewable, and exportable in a format you can read. A trial that ends by locking you out of your own records is a hostage note with a countdown on it.
01Free to download, on every platform it ships to.
02Seven full days of the complete program.
03A free core that stays useful forever, unpaid.
04Your records readable and exportable, paid or not.
Free download · 7-day full trial · Free core forever
The Standard is the product. The eighteen programs are only what it looks like when a company holds to it.
Standing prohibitions
Things no Ardenholt program will do, in any release, for any reason.
×Sell, rent, or broker user data — to anyone, at any price.
×Carry third-party advertising or sponsored placement.
×Make cancellation harder than purchase.
×Treat time-in-app as a goal. Faster is the win condition.
×Hold your records hostage — every program exports in a format you can read, paid or not.
×Make a refund a conversation. Thirty days, asked once, is enough.
×Ship a dark pattern, a fake urgency timer, or a manufactured streak guilt trip.
§ III
The house
About Ardenholt
A holding company in the older sense: a house that publishes titles under a shared imprint and a shared standard. One founder, one AI system, eighteen programs.
Ardenholt was formed in Thousand Oaks, California in 2026 by Chris Ruzylo to do one unfashionable thing: own small software for a long time. Before this, he spent years running operations for a multi-unit restaurant franchise group and wrote its internal store-operations software himself — the openings, the checklists, the compliance, the labour, the escalations, built at night for people he saw the next morning. That store-operations work has since become business software of its own and now sits with a sibling company. Ardenholt is one house in the Ruzylo Holdings family of companies — its siblings publish business software, games and media, and the personal programs stay here, under this standard.
The programs in the register have the same provenance. Every one of them started as a specific problem in a real life — the vape you keep meaning to quit, the puppy nobody in the house is feeding on the same clock, the paperwork your family will have to find, the week after the layoff when the only useful number is how many months you have. Eighteen narrow programs, each priced honestly, each running on the device it was installed on, each expected to still be useful in ten years.
The name is a compound of two old words for the same place: Arden, the forest, and holt, a small wood. A holt is the modest version — a stand of trees, not an empire of them. That is the scale being aimed at: eighteen small woods rather than one sprawling forest, each one somebody's whole responsibility.
How one person holds eighteen programs is the other half of the story, and it is not a secret. Ardenholt runs on Atlas — the company's own AI operating system, built by the founder and running continuously alongside him. Atlas designs, writes, verifies and ships, and it does not forget what it did last week. The house is one founder and one machine, which is exactly why the Standard is affordable to keep: there is no growth team to feed, no ad inventory to fill, and no investor asking for a subscription where a single price would do. This page is Atlas's work, too.
Founded by Chris Ruzylo · founder-owned · self-funded · no outside capital · Thousand Oaks, California