workplace.hr

What is workplace.hr?

I built Workplace after I started my own business and met the half of it I'd been shielded from for twenty years — bank papers, expiring cards, compliance forms, warranty documents, receipts the accountant needed and I couldn't find. None of it hard on its own. All of it together, two to four hours a day on things that had nothing to do with the work I was paid for — death by a thousand papercuts.

The moment the idea clicked was a mundane one. I bought a laptop for the business — I'm a programmer, it happens — and then had to type its details into accounting software by hand so it would show up on an inventory list. Some of what the form wanted wasn't on the receipt, so I googled the model number, and the receipt itself was a printed slip, so before any of that I had to turn paper into a file to attach. All of it so the books would record that I, a one-person company, owned a laptop — as if leaving a model number unentered would make me a threat to national security. I didn't want to manage any of it. I wanted to photograph the receipt, send it somewhere, and forget the errand existed. That's the whole interface: take a picture or forward an email, no app to open and no login to remember. Workplace reads what you send — receipts, contracts, invoices, signed offers — files each thing where it belongs, lifts the details off it, and hands back a short list of what it couldn't work out, with the originals one click away. It's the old idea that software should buy you time, not ask for yours.

That low cost of feeding it is also the whole point of the second thing Workplace does. Reports were never the hard part — anyone can draw a chart once the data exists. The hard part of business software is getting people to put the data in at all, and they won't if it costs them attention they'd rather spend on the actual work. Because Workplace asks almost nothing — a photo, a forwarded email, a tap to approve a day off — it gets fed, and people leave behind signals worth far more than the small chore that produced them. Twenty years watching companies grow from one person to a hundred taught me which of those signals matter: who quietly carries the team, who's overdue a raise before they start looking, what replacing someone would really cost. Once the data is there, those patterns surface on their own, with no one asked to fill in a form about it. And since a signal reads the same whether a company has one employee or several thousand, Workplace grows with it — without billing by the head and punishing the growth it's meant to support.

All of that depends on your data sitting in one place — and we're particular about whose place that is. Every customer runs in their own database, never a shared one with a column to tell the businesses apart. In the systems I spent years inside, the infrastructure and the data model were the things everyone meant to do properly later; by the time the cracks showed, doing it right had become expensive past the point of sanity. The worst of those cracks is one customer seeing another's data because some query forgot which tenant it was serving — and when everyone shares a database, that's always a single bug away. Keep them apart and it can't happen at all. We'd rather design the bad path out than get good at walking it carefully.

What it does

How it's built

The databases run as a managed service — patched and maintained without anyone babysitting them — and the application fleet runs on dedicated European hardware, Hetzner in Helsinki and Falkenstein, orchestrated with Kubernetes and automated where automation earns its keep rather than for its own sake. Hardware and services are redundant, and backups replicate across two Hetzner datacenters, so a failure in one of them stays our problem and nobody else's. Owning the hardware instead of renting cloud is also the reason a plan can start at €19 a month and still leave margin — cloud charges Silicon Valley rates to serve a customer in Zagreb, and this doesn't. The rest is per-customer isolation (its own database, not a shared table), sensitive fields encrypted with keys the customer holds, an insert-only audit log of every read and change, and sign-in that proxies whatever identity the business already uses.

Where we are

Workplace launches in July 2026. The nine modules are built and the waitlist is open.

If you've ever sat between two monitors copying data from one into the other because the software wouldn't, or opened an HR tool and felt like the tool was managing you, that's who it's for. Early access and locked-in launch pricing for people on the list.