Not an Upgrade

Thirty-five years of FastDraft and RediDraft, and why what ships in October is a new thing.

In 1991, two partners at an Atlanta law firm grew tired of rebuilding the same estate planning documents over and over by hand and FastDraft was born. It stored rtf document fragments that could be reassembled in any order, with the client’s information resolved along the way. It ran on DOS and WordPerfect. It worked well enough that their own firm came to depend on it, and in 1993 a company was formed to sell it.

That company rebranded along the way, InterActive Professional Software becoming Valeo Software, and in 2004 Valeo closed its doors. The software didn’t. It came to me, as Valeo’s CTO, along with the firms that depended on it. That handoff shaped everything that’s happened since, because it taught me what this product actually is: not a piece of software so much as a promise to the people whose practices run on it.

By 2010, Windows XP was aging out and a number of firms were still drafting in FastDraft, long past the point where anyone was really supporting it. They asked for a modern version. I rebuilt the whole thing and called it RediDraft, and every RediDraft customer from that day to this one is a former FastDraft firm. A few had drifted away over the years and came back when it ran on their new machines. Nobody was ever added by a marketing campaign. It was a community, and I priced it like one: enough to keep the software alive and cared for, nowhere near what it would take to build a company around it. I sustained it personally, and I was glad to do it.

I’ve since come to see the problem with that kind of pricing, and it isn’t the revenue. In professional software, a price is a promise about the future. A price that covers keeping the lights on promises exactly that: lights on, nothing more, for as long as one person keeps flipping the switch. The firms that run their practices on this software draft instruments their clients’ families will rely on for decades. They deserve a stronger promise than my continued good health and available free time.

So this year, the promise was restructured, in two parts.

The first part is RediDraft Classic: the original client-server platform, modernized. A refreshed client. A new server that installs in minutes on Windows, macOS, or Linux and simpler self-hosting for firms that want their server under their own roof. Classic exists for the firms that have been with us for as long as thirty-five years. It is a first-class product and it will be maintained for as long as firms are using it, at the rates those firms already pay. But it is not for sale to new firms, not at any price. That isn’t us hiding the affordable option. Classic is a promise kept to a specific community; it was never a product line I intended to grow. If your firm wasn’t part of that story, Classic isn’t your product. One is.

RediDraft One arrives in October, and “upgrade” is definitely the wrong word to describe it. One is a new assembly engine, built on a new tech stack over the last two years. It doesn’t need Microsoft Word because it is independent of any word processor. The drafts generated can be opened and used in any modern word processor supporting docx files. It runs in a browser or on the desktop. For nearly two years it has drafted documents in production, internally, before we let it anywhere near a customer. What carried over is the philosophy, which hasn’t changed since 1991: your language, not our content library. Deterministic assembly, meaning the same inputs produce the same document, every time. That is the only behavior that belongs anywhere near a trust instrument. And your documents never live on our servers, which means we couldn’t surveil your practice even if we wanted to.

Here is the sentence that took thirty-five years to earn: everything you built carries forward; everything underneath it is new. A Classic firm’s library exports from Classic, imports into One, and keeps working, because the continuity was never the engine. It’s your provisions, and the way this software has always treated them as yours.

One is priced appropriately for the value it offers. The license is per signing attorney, with unlimited staff and paralegal users included. Your paralegals draft on your license, because charging for the people who do the drafting would tax the exact delegation that makes the product worth having. Every number is published on the pricing page; you will never have to schedule a call to find out what something costs. For most practices, one plan a year covers the license. And that price is what buys the stronger promise: active development, real support, and a product built to outlive its maker, so the firms depending on it are never again depending on one person. The reason you can trust One’s future is that it’s priced to have a future.

FastDraft became RediDraft, RediDraft became Classic, and now there is One. The through-line is a community of firms that kept this software alive for thirty-five years because it treated their work as theirs: their language, their clients, their practice. One is how that community’s next thirty-five years get built.

— Tim