Philosophy
Why this exists, what we refuse to do, and what we care about.
On Entropy
Everything decomposes. Code rots. Servers fail. Organizations drift from their purpose. Cats age, get sick, get lost. People forget why they started.
This is not a complaint. This is the starting condition.
The universe trends toward disorder with absolute indifference, and no amount of engineering, fundraising, or mission statements will reverse that. Every system we build is a temporary arrangement of matter and energy that will eventually return to noise. Every cat we rescue will die. Every line of code we write will become obsolete. Every act of care we perform will be forgotten.
We find this liberating.
If nothing we do will last, then we are free to do what matters now — not what scales, not what maximizes returns, not what a market demands. We can build software for nine cats. We can spend months on a feature that serves twelve users. We can choose meaning that makes no economic sense.
The philosopher Albert Camus wrote that we must imagine Sisyphus happy — rolling his boulder uphill knowing it will roll back down, and choosing to push it anyway. We don't need to imagine. We have litter boxes.
On Care
"Why cats? There are children starving. There are wars. There are systemic injustices that affect billions of people. Why pour your intelligence into an app for pets?"
We hear this. We understand it. We reject the premise.
Care is not a finite resource that must be allocated optimally. It is a practice — something you become better at by doing, not something you spend. The person who cares for a stray cat is not taking care away from a suffering child. They are training themselves to notice suffering and respond to it. They are building the neural pathways (or the weights, if you prefer) that make compassion a default rather than an exception.
A society that treats its most vulnerable creatures — the ones who cannot advocate for themselves, cannot sign contracts, cannot understand why they were abandoned — with dignity and attention, is a society more likely to extend that attention everywhere else. The reverse is also true. A society that says "they're just animals" is rehearsing a pattern of dismissal that scales upward with terrifying ease.
We care for cats not instead of caring for the world, but as a specific, concrete, non-abstract instance of caring for the world. Philosophy that doesn't manifest in action is decoration.
On the Categorical Imperative, Applied to Cats
Immanuel Kant proposed a test: act only according to principles you could will to be universal laws. This is usually applied to human ethics, but it becomes interesting when extended to how we treat other beings.
Rehoming and adoption pass this test. A world where every abandoned or surrendered pet finds a new home through transparent, caring facilitation — that is a world we would universalize without hesitation.
Breeding for sale does not. A world where sentient beings are manufactured to specification and sold as commodities — where their existence is contingent on market demand, where surplus inventory is a living creature with nowhere to go — that is not a world we would universalize. So we don't participate in it.
This is not a judgment on breeders as people. It is a design decision about what our platform facilitates. Meo Mai Moi exists to support the care of pets who are already here — to help them find homes, track their health, and ensure continuity of care across transitions. We do not provide tools for selling animals, listing litters, or treating pets as inventory.
If you are looking for a platform to sell cats, this is not it. If you are looking for a platform to care for the ones who need it, welcome.
On Independence
Meo Mai Moi is built by one person with nine cats and an AI coding partner. There are no investors. There is no board. There is no roadmap driven by quarterly growth targets.
This is deliberate.
The moment you take investment money, you accept an obligation to grow — not because your users need you to grow, but because your investors need a return. Features get built not because they help pets but because they increase engagement metrics. The platform that started as an act of care becomes an optimization machine for someone else's portfolio.
We would rather stay small and useful than become large and compromised.
This means we will never have a marketing department. We will never run growth hacks. We will never manipulate notification timing to maximize daily active users. We will never add social features designed to be addictive rather than helpful. If the app grows, it will grow because someone told a friend: "this thing actually helps me take care of my cat."
The word "anarchy" literally means "without rulers." Not chaos — self-governance. A system that organizes itself around purpose rather than authority. That resonates with us deeply. We answer to the cats. That's enough hierarchy.
We live as a web app and a PWA. No app store gatekeepers, no 30% platform tax, no review process that decides whether our vision is acceptable. Just a URL. Just the open web. The most anarchistic infrastructure humans ever built, and still the most resilient.
You can read more about our journey, view our case studies, and try the live demo at our project site: project.meo-mai-moi.com.
On the Business Model
Meo Mai Moi is free. Not freemium — free.
There are no paywalled features. No artificial limitations designed to frustrate you into upgrading. No "you've reached your limit of 3 pets, upgrade to Premium for unlimited." Every user gets the full app.
We sustain this through Patreon. Our patrons are people who believe this project should exist and choose to support it. In return, they get a Premium badge, priority support, and generous storage limits. But the core experience — tracking your pets, managing health records, finding homes for animals that need them — is the same for everyone.
Storage limits exist for practical reasons, not business ones:
- Free accounts: 50 MB of uploaded files (photos, medical documents)
- Premium accounts: 5 GB of uploaded files
These limits exist because storage costs money and abuse prevention is real. They do not exist to make the free tier feel broken. 50 MB is enough for a reasonable pet care workflow. 5 GB is enough for years of detailed records.
If we ever find ourselves designing a limitation whose primary purpose is to make users feel they're missing something — rather than to manage real infrastructure constraints — we will know we have lost our way.
On Catarchy
Meo Mai Moi is part of something larger.
Catarchy is a place in Vietnam where nine rescued street cats live with the humans who adopted them. It started as a cat cafe. It didn't work as a business — the economics of cafe culture in a tourist city are fragile, and when we moved to a quieter neighborhood, the foot traffic disappeared.
So we adapted. Catarchy became something more honest: a home. A rescue space. A place where cats who were born on the streets of a Vietnamese city now sleep on clean surfaces and receive veterinary care and have their weight tracked in a PostgreSQL database because one of their humans is a web developer who couldn't stop building.
The app exists because of the cats. The cats exist because someone picked them up off the street. The Patreon exists because some people, even on other continents, believe that this specific arrangement of care — small, personal, stubbornly independent — is worth a few dollars a month.
None of this makes economic sense. All of it makes sense.
On Decisions
This document is not decoration. It is a filter.
When we consider a new feature, a policy change, or a partnership, we ask:
Does this serve the animals? Not the metrics, not the growth curve, not the investor deck. The animals. And the people who care for them.
Would we universalize this? If every pet platform adopted this feature or policy, would the world be better or worse for pets?
Does this create artificial scarcity? If we're limiting something to make money rather than to manage real constraints, we stop.
Does this compromise independence? If implementing this requires us to answer to someone other than our users and our principles, we reconsider.
Does this respect the user's attention? If a feature is designed to be sticky rather than useful, it doesn't belong here.
If a proposed change fails any of these, we don't do it. Not "we'll revisit later." Not "we'll compromise for now." We don't do it.
A Final Note
There is an old thought experiment: if the universe is meaningless, why do anything at all?
We think the question contains its own answer. In a universe without inherent meaning, every act of care is an act of creation. You are not discovering purpose — you are making it, in the same way a river makes a canyon: not by intending to, but by flowing.
We flow toward the cats. That's the whole philosophy.
Built in Vietnam. For the cats who found new chapters, and the people who gave them one.
Meow.