About
A small, deliberate product built by someone who needed it first.
The problem
Assistants forget. Every new conversation starts from nothing, so you re-explain your stack, your preferences, and the decisions you already made. The fixes on offer all have the same shape: give one vendor your context and hope they keep it, keep supporting it, and keep letting you leave.
The position
Varven takes the opposite view. Your memory is a folder of Markdown files on your own computer. You can read it without us, back it up yourself, and walk away without asking permission — there is no export to request because there is nothing to unlock.
The cloud is a convenience laid on top: a searchable copy so your assistant can still answer when your machine is asleep. It is genuinely useful and it is genuinely optional.
And because it speaks an open protocol rather than one vendor's API, the same memory is readable by whatever you use next.
The name
A varve is a single layer of sediment laid down in one year. Pull a core sample and the bands read like tree rings — a record you can count backwards through, each layer holding what the world was doing when it settled. The word comes from the Swedish varv, meaning a turn or a layer. Varven is its plural: the layers.
That is the whole design in one word. Memory is deposited in order, and it stays readable in order.
Who builds it
Francisco Padilla — an engineer who built this for himself first, ran it daily for months, and only then turned it into something other people could install.
Varven is independent and self-funded. There are no investors to satisfy, which is why the free tier is genuinely free and why the pricing page has no “contact sales” button.
Where it is going
Writing from the cloud, then shared memory for teams. Beyond that, the roadmap is decided by whoever is paying for it. If you are using Varven and something is missing, say so — at this size, one email genuinely changes the order of the work.