Measure work, not people
Every design decision that could be answered with monitoring gets answered another way. That constraint is written down on the data page, and it is not negotiable for a customer who would prefer surveillance.
Six months ago I could not answer a simple question about my own team: which engineers were actually getting value out of the AI tools the company was paying for. Peer reviews said everyone was doing great. Self-assessments said everyone was an expert. The work said something else. Three sources, three answers, no way to tell which one to act on.
That gap is not new to me. I spent two decades at PetroStyle, most of it running teams, and hit the same problem from the inside twice — first with skills in general, then with AI specifically. Both times the honest answer was that we were managing people on impressions and calling it data.
HRPulsar is the third technology company I have built and the first one built in the open from day one: AGPL core, public changelog, roadmap marked as a roadmap. Partly because that is the only way a small team earns trust with HR-grade data. Partly because a measurement standard that nobody can inspect is not a standard — it is a vendor's opinion.
Every design decision that could be answered with monitoring gets answered another way. That constraint is written down on the data page, and it is not negotiable for a customer who would prefer surveillance.
The live version is on the landing page and in the footer of every page, the roadmap is marked as a roadmap, and the changelog is public. If something is not built yet, the site labels it planned instead of implying otherwise.
The core is AGPL and self-hostable, so a company that does not trust us can run it without us. The Cloud earns its keep through the cross-company network, not through lock-in.
That is the real answer to the question everyone asks second, so it is on the page rather than in a call. Today HRPulsar is a single engineer shipping releases, plus contractors for design and legal work. The published version and the public changelog are the honest record of what that produces.
What it buys you: the person who answers your email is the person who fixes the bug, usually in the same week. What it costs you: there is no 24/7 support rotation, and I say so before you ask. Self-host exists precisely so that the product outlives any arrangement between us.
Hiring follows revenue and design partners, in that order — engineering first, then customer-facing support. If you are evaluating HRPulsar for a team of a few hundred people and want to know exactly where that stands this quarter, ask me directly and I will tell you.