18 August 2026
First in a series on small software.
Fiona has a spreadsheet for the holiday.
Not a document. Not a group chat where everyone sends links and then loses them. A spreadsheet, with tabs, and the tabs have colours, and the colours mean something. Green is booked. Amber is "provisionally discussed on WhatsApp." Red is Dave.
There's a Flights tab where she's compared eleven options by total journey time including transfers, because Dave once suggested a "cheaper" flight that landed at Bergamo. There's a Packing tab with a column per person and a row per item, and one cell has gone orange because Dave has not confirmed whether he owns swimming shorts. There's a Budget tab converting euros at a rate she looked up in March and has never updated, so the holiday is theoretically £40 cheaper than reality. And there is a tab called IDEAS – DO NOT DELETE, which contains a single link to a restaurant that closed in 2019.
It works. It absolutely works. The holiday happens, everyone gets there, and Dave brings swimming shorts.
Fiona also has a spreadsheet for the under-11s snack rota. It has a data validation dropdown so that other parents cannot type "orange segments?" with a question mark, because one of them did that in September and Fiona has not fully recovered. It sends nothing, reminds nobody, and depends entirely on Fiona noticing on a Thursday that Saturday is uncovered. She always notices. She is load-bearing.
And at work, Fiona owns The Sheet. You know The Sheet. Nobody decided to build The Sheet. It accreted. It has a tab that's really a database, a column that's really a workflow, and a colour-coding scheme that is really a permissions system, in the sense that everyone knows not to touch the red ones. When Fiona is on annual leave the department slows down by about twenty per cent, and nobody can explain why on the org chart.
Here's the thing about Fiona, and it's the whole point of this post: Fiona is not doing it wrong.
Fiona is an extremely capable systems thinker who was handed a grid.
For basically the entire history of software, building a tool cost more than most problems were worth.
Not the big ones. Payroll got software. Accounting got software. But underneath those sits an enormous long tail of small, real, specific problems — the snack rota, the film shoot, the bathroom renovation, the thirty conversations you're halfway through — where building something cost comfortably more than putting up with something worse.
So we put up with something worse. And because spreadsheets are free and infinitely bendy, they became the universal solvent for every operational problem beneath the line. Not because they fit. Because they were there.
Every working spreadsheet in Britain is an application in a trench coat. The tabs are tables. The dropdown is validation. The orange cell is an alert that only fires if Fiona happens to look at it. The formula in G14 is business logic, it is documented nowhere, and Fiona wrote it in 2021 while on hold to Vodafone.
Airtable and Notion made the trench coat nicer. They did not stop it being a trench coat. You still bend your problem into someone else's shape — a lovely shape, a well-designed shape, but theirs. And you're still the one bending.
There's a threshold below which building a tool wasn't worth the bother, and above which it was, and that threshold sat in roughly the same place for thirty years. Piled up just beneath it is a staggering quantity of human effort: everything that deserved an app and got a grid instead.
The line has moved. Quite far. Quite suddenly.
Which means an enormous amount of software that was never going to exist is now worth making. Not products. Not startups. Nothing with a landing page or a pricing tier. Tools for six people. Tools for one person. Tools you use for four months and then delete, like scaffolding.
Y Combinator has a name for this. They call it small software — bespoke tools for one person or one team, which they reckon should be as easy to share as a Google Doc. That sounds about right to me, and it's a better name than "the spreadsheet you're using as an app," which is what I'd been calling it.
She has a holiday app.
It opens on her phone. The packing list has checkboxes, one column per person, and when Dave finally confirms the swimming shorts he ticks it himself and the orange goes away without Fiona having to chase him twice. The budget converts euros at today's rate, which is a mild disappointment. The flights are just there, sorted by the total journey time she actually cares about. And the restaurant that closed in 2019 is still in it, because Fiona has moved the tab across verbatim and will not be taking questions.
She has a snack rota that texts you on Thursday when it's your turn on Saturday. It will not let you type "orange segments?" It doesn't need Fiona to notice anything. It just quietly works, every week, and the parents who used to break it can't, because the app simply doesn't offer them the opportunity.
And The Sheet is now a proper little application. The tab that was really a database is a database. The column that was really a workflow has buttons that move things along. The colour-coding that was really a permissions system is a permissions system, so nobody can touch the red ones — not because they know not to, but because they can't. G14 has a name now.
Fiona went on annual leave last month and the department did not slow down at all. She found this mildly disappointing, and then she got over it, and then she built another one on the flight home.
None of these are products. Nobody will pay for them. Two of them will be deleted by Christmas. That's not a failure of ambition — that's just what small software is. Scaffolding for a specific bit of life, put up quickly, taken down when the thing is finished.
On weeny, of course.
Because that's the bit that's still awkward. An app for six people needs a link those six people can open on their phones without installing anything. It needs to still be there in March. It needs those six people in and everybody else out. And it wants to keep running — texting parents on a Thursday, converting euros this morning — rather than being a thing you have to go and wake up.
Deployment platforms are built for products with users, not tools with a group chat. Free hosting stops the moment anything needs to actually keep running. And the serious infrastructure tier is an absurd amount of machinery to point at a snack rota.
weeny.cloud is a teeny weeny, simple wimple cloud for precisely this — the home for small software. Your agent builds the thing, weeny gives it somewhere to live and a link you can send to Dave.
Say hello to Fiona for me.