Free software from Calgary, Alberta
Oxin Studio makes small, careful apps for Mac, Windows, iPhone and iPad — and gives them away. No ads, no accounts, no tracking, nothing locked behind a monthly payment. Built for families who cannot justify another subscription, and for anyone who would rather their files stayed on their own computer.
Nine apps. All free. Nothing to unlock.
Why they are free
Most software that costs nothing to install is paid for some other way — with advertising, with data, or with a subscription that appears three screens in. These apps are not. They are finished, they are complete, and they are given away.
A colouring app should not cost more per year than the tablet it runs on. Every children's app here is complete on the day it is installed: no premium tier, no unlockable packs, no advertising SDK following a four-year-old around.
Contracts, medical notes, half-formed ideas — none of it needs to be uploaded to somebody else's server to be edited. These apps do their work on your own machine, and most of them keep working with the Wi-Fi switched off.
Sometimes you need to merge two PDFs once. You should not have to make an account, start a trial, or hand over a card number to do it. Download the app, do the thing, get on with your day.
The apps
Native apps — no Electron wrappers, no browser in a costume. Built one at a time, and kept working after release.
macOS
Free Direct Download Biruni The dual-pane file manager DOS power users never stopped missing. Biruni is a fast, native macOS file manager built as a tribute to Norton…
macOS
Now on the Mac App Store Calamo Private AI. On your computer. For real. A polished AI assistant for macOS that runs powerful open-source language models entirely on…
Free for Personal Use · macOS · v1.1 Khayyam PDF Editor A native macOS PDF editor built for annotating, editing, merging, and signing documents. Khayyam PDF Editor is…
macOS
Now on the Mac App Store New File Creator Right-click. New file. Done. The one thing macOS has always been missing — a right-click menu that lets you…
macOS
Free Direct Download Rumi A native Mac editor built for people who live in tabs. Rumi is a fast, native macOS text and code editor — real window…
iPhone & iPad
Free Private Photo Booth for Kids and Parents
iPhone & iPad
Free · iPhone & iPad · v1.0 Lurush Painting for kids. Free, forever. Thirty-six coloring sheets, eight real brushes, and a mixing bench where blue and yellow make…
iPhone & iPad
Free · iPhone & iPad · v1.0 Meowdy Find out what your cat is really saying. It isn’t. Hold your phone up to your cat and tap the…
The small print, which is short
There is no version of any of this software that treats a paying user better than a non-paying one, because there is no paying user. If you install an app and never send a penny, you have exactly what everyone else has.
No premium tier, no pro edition, no watermark on the export. Every feature is in the app you downloaded.
No analytics, no crash reporter phoning home with more than it needs, no advertising identifier. Several of the apps contain no networking code at all.
No account, no email address, no sign-in. Download, open, use.
They pay Apple's developer fee and the hosting bill. They do not buy features, priority, or a different build.
iPhone & iPad
Free Private Photo Booth for Kids and Parents
For children
Search the App Store for a colouring app and most of what comes back is free to install and quietly expensive afterwards — a few pictures unlocked, the rest behind a weekly subscription, and a premium button placed exactly where small fingers land.
These were built the other way round. Everything is available the moment the app is installed, there is no button that charges anyone, and nothing a child taps leads somewhere they should not be. Put the iPad in Airplane Mode and nothing changes, because nothing ever needed a connection.
Entirely optional
Apple charges $99 a year to keep an app on the App Store, free or not. If that lapses, these apps disappear. A one-time contribution from anyone who can spare it keeps everything free for everyone who cannot — and nobody who does not donate gets a lesser version.
There is no support queue and no ticket number — there is one person who reads the messages. Say which app, which version, and what happened, and you will get a real reply.
Most of these apps exist because somebody needed one and could not find a version that was not renting itself out monthly. If that describes something you need, say so — it might be next.
