State of Gand, September 2026: fewer things, each paying its own way

In June I put up a tour of everything Gand makes. Gand is my one-person studio, and the tour was long. That was part of the problem.

This is the follow-up, and it is a different kind of post. It covers fewer products and asks each of them one question: how does it pay for itself?

Building has never been the hard part. I can build things in my sleep, and judging by some of the commit timestamps, I sometimes do. The hard part is getting small, careful tools in front of the people who need them. So this quarter I cut, merged and paused until every remaining product had one job, one way to earn its keep and one next step.

The short version

The vigil.* family is the main bet. The apps stay free. One new subscription, Vigil Pro, lets your AI assistant work across Vigil Today, vigil.wiki and Vigil Quest.
Skrivist becomes three products: two free readers that need no account, and one paid Cloud plan.
FableSpun is paused.
SUDONE is live on Android, with iOS next.
Games get their own home at gand.games.

The vigil.* family

This is a set of small apps that share one account at vigil.center. Every one of them is also an MCP server, so an AI assistant such as Claude can read and act in it for you. That started back in May as an MCP server bolted onto Vigil Today. It has since become the organising principle of the whole family.

Vigil Today: reminders and habits that drift from green to red as their moment approaches. It’s where this all started.
vigil.wiki: notes with backlinks, and one-click publishing.
Vigil Quest: long goals broken into milestones.
vigil.directory: the public face, where published notes live. The original of this post lives there.
vigil.computer: private AI that runs in your browser. It is on hold while I focus on the rest.

What changed: the web apps are free and stay free. The thing that actually costs money is AI access at scale, so that is what I now charge for. Vigil Pro is one subscription, bought once at vigil.center/pro, that turns on AI-assistant (MCP) access for Vigil Today, vigil.wiki and Vigil Quest together. It costs $4.99 a month or $39 a year, with a 14-day free trial. It replaces the separate per-app prices I had before, which were a pricing model only their author could love, and it rolls out to each app over the coming weeks.

Next: getting the vigil connectors listed where people actually look for them: the Claude and ChatGPT app directories, and the public MCP registry. An MCP server nobody can find is just an API with extra steps.

Skrivist

Skrivist started as one web app for reading and listening to your ebooks. It is becoming three products, split by who they are for:

Skrivist Books: free, runs entirely in your browser, and needs no account. Read your EPUBs offline, browse OPDS catalogs and your Calibre library, and keep notes.
Skrivist Comics: free and local too, for comics and OPDS libraries. I wrote about building it last week, including the part where I measured the model it was designed around and then deleted it.
Skrivist Cloud: $4.90 a month with a 7-day free trial, for people who want their library synced across devices, read aloud, and fed from Calibre.

Most readers need nothing more than the free apps, and they get them without handing over an email address. Cloud is being rebuilt around the new design and will open when it is ready. skriv.ist has the details.

FableSpun: paused

FableSpun spins illustrated, narrated stories from a “series bible” of characters and worlds. It grew out of FableCast and the story creation studio behind it, and it ran a weekly multilingual library for young children.

I have paused it. Selling AI-generated products to children carries a regulatory and moral responsibility that a one-person studio should not take on lightly, and I would rather stop than do it halfway. The kids’ edition no longer takes new sign-ups.

The story engine itself is good, though. When there is time, I want to point it at adults, for example graded story series for people learning a language. There is no date for that yet, and I am not going to invent one here.

SUDONE

SUDONE is a barcode scanner for shoppers in Japan. Scan a product in a store, see what Rakuten and Yahoo! Shopping charge for it, and get a straight answer: buy it here, or buy it online. There is no account to create. The June launch post has the architecture, and the saga of the static IP.

It is on Google Play today, and iOS follows as soon as my App Store setup is complete. Before I spend anything on promotion, I want to measure which prices people actually act on. After that I am exploring a “restock at home” feature: a price watch for the things you buy again and again.

gand.games

One more change: games are spinning off into their own corner, gand.games. That’s where I’ll be publishing them from now on, kept apart from the tools so neither has to pretend to be the other. More on that front in a later update.

What’s next

Vigil Pro rolls out across Vigil Today, vigil.wiki and Vigil Quest, followed by directory listings.
Skrivist Cloud gets rebuilt around the three-product split.
SUDONE reaches iOS and starts measuring what shoppers use.
FableSpun stays parked until I can give it proper attention.

Fewer things, done properly, each able to pay its own way. That’s the state of Gand in September 2026.

The original version of this post was drafted with an AI assistant through vigil.wiki’s MCP connector, reviewed, and published to vigil.directory the same way. Eating my own dog food, for once, with a knife and fork.