At the risk of dating myself (getting old), I’ve been around computers long enough to remember punch cards and working on an IBM System/360 mainframe.
Then came PCs, where the software model was simple: you bought a software license and you owned it forever, and you used it until you needed an upgrade worth paying for.
These days, the industry default has swung hard toward recurring subscriptions. I get why that model makes sense for hosted services with continuous cloud compute or storage costs. But for a local developer utility? It often feels misplaced.
A while ago, I just needed a simple, dedicated tool to manage SSH tunnels. Nothing fancy, just a clean way to keep track of port forwards and keep background connections stable without cluttering terminal tabs.
When I looked around at the existing options, I ran into two extremes:
- The bloated subscription tools: Apps that started asking for monthly or annual fees, piling on unnecessary features to try to justify recurring billing for what is fundamentally a straightforward task.
- The neglected utilities: Free or one-off tools that worked, but had dated, clunky interfaces where ease of use was not a design consideration at all.
How much feature churn does an SSH tunnel manager actually need? I just wanted a tool that does one job cleanly.
So out of frustration, I built the initial version of Shazbot that would have worked for me in a single evening of vibe coding with Claude Code.
For better or for worse, this got me wondering about publishing it on the App Store, and I went down the rabbit hole trying to address all the possible use cases that I would never run into but another user might. Then came the arduous work of actually being eligible or compatible with the App Store; I'd say that at least as much work happened here as the actual software development.
It isn't an attempt to launch a software empire; I sincerely thought that other DEVs might appreciate a simple, one-time priced utility and call it a day. If I can make enough in license fees to recover the Apple Developer membership costs, then great!
I'll keep fixing bugs as they get found for as long as I can (don't want to say forever because nothing is forever), and if I think of enough useful features, I'll release a V2 for another $4.99.