Technology with purpose
Technology with purpose: the community decides what we build
· 4 min read
Picture two meetings. In the first, a team asks: “What could we build that would get us more paying users?” In the second, someone reads out a message from a mother who has spent months looking for an app for her son and can't find one. Both meetings produce software. But they decide very different things, for very different people.
Most software is built in the first meeting, and that's understandable: someone has to pay for the development. But that logic leaves out an enormous number of real needs — those of older people, disabled people, people with rare conditions — simply because they don't add up to a large market. Social-purpose technology comes from turning the question around: instead of “what's profitable to build?”, we ask “what would genuinely help, and who for?”
The “unprofitable market” problem
When a need affects few people, or people with limited means, it rarely finds a decent digital solution. Not because building it is impossible, but because nobody sees a return. The result is a great many families searching in vain for an app that fits their situation, settling for generic tools or for pen and paper.
| The usual model | The SaH model |
|---|---|
| How many will pay? | How many people need it? |
| Minority needs get ignored | The real need counts |
| Price as a barrier | Free for whoever uses it |
| The big market wins | Whoever needs it most wins |
That gap isn't families failing to search properly. It's a failure in how we decide which software gets to exist. And it can be corrected by changing who makes that decision.
Let real demand decide, not marketing
The Software as Help model rests on a simple idea: let the community, rather than a business plan, decide what gets built. It works in four steps, with no small print.
- You tell us the need — In one sentence, no jargon.
- We assess demand — How many people share that same gap.
- We answer honestly — Clear feedback on where the idea stands.
- We build it, free — If there's real traction, it gets built.
That fourth step is the one that tends to surprise people: free for the patient and the family. It isn't a marketing detail, it's the whole point. If the aim is to reach the people who need it most, putting a price in front of them would contradict it.
Why listening is the most important technical work
In this model, the most valuable line of code is written after listening properly. A medication reminder app that's been misunderstood is just another alarm; understand an older person's day and their carer's day, and it becomes a safety net. The difference isn't technical, it's attention. That's why the perspective of families, carers and professionals — people who don't need to know how to code — is the most important raw material we have.
You can see the approach in practice in our guides on medication reminders that work and AAC for families: each one comes from a specific need, not from a feature we wanted to sell.
Purposeful technology isn't naive technology
Being not-for-profit doesn't mean working with less rigour. Quite the opposite: when you build for vulnerable people, accessibility, privacy and reliability aren't extras, they're obligations. Social-purpose technology demands more care than commercial technology, if anything, because the cost of getting it wrong is paid by whoever has the least room to absorb it.
In short
There are plenty of good apps that will never be built because they aren't a business. Changing that doesn't take magic: it takes letting real community demand decide what gets built, and committing to reaching the people who need it free of charge. If you or someone around you needs a tool that doesn't exist yet, that's exactly the kind of story we want to hear: tell us.