Describe your business once. Run it everywhere.
A project starts with a rulebook: your tables, fields and calculations in one readable file. The database, API, admin app and docs are generated from it. The rulebook is yours — replace the app entirely, and the rules still run.
Free to try. No card needed.
One hour. Your app is built while we talk.
We turn the conversation into your rulebook and a working app while we talk. You spend the back half of the hour inside it — clicking through as each role would see it, and changing a rule to watch the app follow. You leave with a link, a short walkthrough video and a fixed price.
Working with an Effortless Team
Intros, and your idea
You meet the team, say what you do and what is getting in the way. Then you describe it the way you would to a new hire. Nothing is typed into a form; the transcript lands when you are done.
NikoHi Bob, I'm Niko from EffortlessAPI. Thanks for making the time.
BobGlad to. I run Common Table, a community kitchen. Free meals, five nights a week.
NikoWhat's getting in the way right now?
The hour, in 8 min: the description, the build running while we talk, the first click through the app, and what you leave with.
Bring a problem. Leave with a working app.
One hour on Zoom with the people who build Effortless. Describe a piece of your business and watch it become software. No slides, no charge.
Book your first call →Opens our calendar on Calendly. Prefer to try it yourself? Start a project for free.
Start where you actually are.
Each page has its own short film.
Describe it in a sentence and get the rulebook for it: every table, field and rule, written down where you can read it.
Watch the film and read more →Most projectsOne process, and it lives in someone's head.The undocumented thing your team works around. Write it down once, get software that runs on it.
Watch the film and read more →For dev shopsI deliver software for other people.Describe your methodology once, and deliver against it, again and again.
Watch the film and read more →Ontology & auditEvery department means something different by the same word.Ontology, provenance and audit readiness — a system of record that survives the people who built it.
Watch the film and read more →Free to try. Then pick the Loops Runner you need.
Start free with no card. Pay for the Loops Runner that builds your project (a bigger one, more at once and more hours each month) or run it on your own machine for $29, plus the paid seeds you choose to add — seeds are ready-made packages (an import, an integration, a working app) you drop into any project. Browse seeds →
Free
Try it on a real project. No card.
- Every project, its rulebook and every export
- A Loops Runner (1 core · 4 GiB) that sleeps after 5 idle minutes
- Runner hours and Claude from your credit
Starter
Your own machine, or a hosted Loops Runner 20 hours a week.
- 20 hours a week of a hosted Loops Runner (87 a month), more at $8 for 10
- 1 core · 3 GiB, sleeps after 15 idle minutes
- 1 invited editor
- Loops on your own machine, with your own Anthropic key
- Claude on your credit, or on your own Anthropic key
Builder
A bigger hosted Loops Runner, 30 hours a week of building.
- 30 hours a week of a hosted Loops Runner (130 a month), more at $8 for 10
- 1.5 cores · 4 GiB, sleeps after 30 idle minutes
- 2 invited editors
- Loops on your own machine, with your own Anthropic key
- Claude on your credit, or on your own Anthropic key
Pro
Full time: 40 hours a week of building on the biggest Loops Runner.
- 40 hours a week of a hosted Loops Runner (173 a month), more at $8 for 10
- 2 cores · 6 GiB, sleeps after 60 idle minutes
- 3 invited editors
- Loops on your own machine, with your own Anthropic key
- Claude on your credit, or on your own Anthropic key
Start anywhere. Arrive at the same project.
A new project starts with the same starter rulebook effortless -init writes. Bring your own rules in when you create it, or later. It is the same step either way.
A project with a core rulebook
Ready to edit, to add seeds and tools to, and to start. However it began.
A git log can't tell you which commits matter. A rulebook can.
Move a button, refactor a service, change how late fees are calculated — git gives every one of those commits a hash, the same way. An Effortless project is tracked in git too, but its rulebook gets a new hash only when a rule actually changes, with the exact line that changed named next to it: auditable, cradle to grave. Most software can't offer that, because the rules and the implementation are mixed together across the whole codebase.
The same rules, checked across five engines.
Each example defines its rules once, as structured data. Our open-source repository runs that rulebook through Postgres, Python, Go, Excel and COBOL and checks that every one agrees with the others. Inspect the rules, change them, and run the checks yourself.
A loan's underwriting and covenant-monitoring lifecycle, as a state machine — one of the substrates it runs on is COBOL.
View the example →A 39-table causal map of autoimmune disease, the same rules rendered in OWL and in Postgres.
View the example →40 tables, nearly 9,000 rows, 411 calculated fields — the paradox reproduced from rules, not scripted.
View the example →Keep your tools. Change what they point at.
This is not a replacement for Cursor, or for the Airtable base your team actually runs on. It is the layer underneath both — the one that holds the rules, so nothing above it has to.
They are genuinely good at the screen — where things go, and how the thing feels to use. They are not where a business rule should live. Point one at a codebase and every rule becomes a line buried somewhere nobody can find later.
Point it at a rulebook-enforced database instead. It carries on doing the part it is good at, on a foundation where the rules are already enforced.
This is where most of these rules already live: spread across formulas, automations and views that one person understands and nobody ever wrote down. It worked right up until the day it became the system of record.
Airtable is a first-class input, not something to flee. Point us at the base and it comes back as a rulebook you can read — and that rulebook is what builds the real database, API and app.
Every one of those numbers is a range, and the width of the range is the amount of typing nobody can predict. That is not bad estimating. It is what happens when the rules get written four times over.
We write them once. That is the whole reason we can put a single number on a card instead of a range.
Technology is a setting, not a rewrite: the same rulebook compiles onto Postgres, MySQL, Airtable, Django and Entity Framework through seeds. Want the long version? How we compare lays it out row by row, including what we don't claim.
Or run it yourself.
Everything we build your project with is open source, and it is the same engine either way — three commands and you are running it. Commercial licenses are for companies running many projects at once, and for large organizations.
- 01Add Effortless to Claude Code
Two commands install the Effortless skills.
- 02Describe your app in one sentence
Claude writes the rules and builds a working app.
- 03Change a rule
Say it in plain language. The whole app follows.
Regulated gaming already runs on this.
A US state agency and a tribal gaming commission both run regulatory software built this way — the kind that gets audited. So does a live cattle auction platform, a car wash chain and a nursery group.
“EffortlessAPI upgraded our entire gaming device management system.”
“EffortlessAPI has made our entire regulatory gaming compliance operation more efficient, improving efficiency by over 250%.”
“No way we could have rebuilt CattleUSA without your expertise.”
Free to try. Then pick the Loops Runner you need.
Start free with no card. Upgrade inside for a bigger runner, more of them at once and more hours each month, or run it all on your own machine and your own Anthropic key.
Want a hand getting there? Training, consulting and onsite work are on Professional services.
- Starter $29/monthYour machine, your compute, your Anthropic key
- Builder $59/monthYour machine, your compute, your Anthropic key
- Pro $89/monthYour machine, your compute, your Anthropic key