About Us
An independent studio building single-purpose tools
Black Candle Technologies is a small, independent studio. We build software that does one thing well — tools we'd use ourselves, shipped when they're ready and honest about what they are.
We're deliberately small: no roadmap theater, no growth hacks, no selling the future. What’s live is live, what’s planned is labelled planned, and the flagship work is open source so you can verify everything we claim.
Team
Two people, no hierarchy
Black Candle is run by its builders. No managers, no handoffs — the people writing the software are the people answering for it.
Co-founder
Riley Calhoun
Riley started Black Candle Technologies to build the kind of software he wants to exist: single-purpose tools, local-first where it counts, no dark patterns. He works across AI/ML and infrastructure — from GPU cloud experiments to the servers everything runs on.
Co-founder
Lane Calhoun
Lane builds Courier alongside Riley — joint roadmap, independent audits, shared infrastructure. He keeps the servers running and the reviews honest.
How we build
Four rules we actually follow
Hold us to them.
01
Shipped beats announced
Every claim on this site is true of the product today. If something is planned, it’s labelled planned — never sold as live.
02
Fail loudly, never guess
When our software can’t do something, it says so. A visible error beats a confident wrong answer, every time.
03
You own your infrastructure
Local-first, self-hostable, auditable. No lock-in, no holding your data hostage for the next pricing tier.
04
No dark patterns
We say exactly what our software does. No 20-minute onboarding for a 2-minute job, no growth hacks dressed as features.