Who builds this
Three people in a shared workshop north of Ghent, funded by support contracts and nothing else.
In March 2024 two of us were on a four-person data team moving freight manifests around. A nightly reconciliation job had been quietly reading from a stale replica for eleven days; it exited zero every night and wrote a plausible-looking number of rows. We found it because an accountant asked a question, not because any of our tooling noticed, and the post-mortem produced a shell script that wrote run durations to a Postgres table.
That script became useful to other teams in the building faster than it became good, so we cleaned it up and published 0.1.0 in July 2024. For the next six months it was a weekend project with twelve users we knew by name. We registered Slatepipe BV in January 2025 once two of those users asked whether they could pay for a guaranteed answer, which remains the entire business model.
The three of us
- Hanne Devos - collector, database, alerts
Wrote the first version of the ingest path and has rewritten it twice since. Spent 2025 arguing for fewer features and won most of those arguments, which is why the rule file has four rule types and not fourteen.
- Timo Raeymaekers - agent, integrations, releases
Owns the wrapper and the promise that it never changes your job's exit code. Responsible for withdrawing the scheduler plugin in 0.13.0, a decision he describes as the most useful thing he did that year.
- Sofie Claes - documentation, two days a week
Writes the pages you are reading and the install guide, and tests both by following them on a clean machine every minor release. The honest limits page was her idea after a support thread where somebody had expected lineage.
How it has gone
| When | What happened |
|---|---|
| Mar 2024 | Shell script and one Postgres table, written after the stale replica incident. |
| Jul 2024 | Version 0.1.0 published under Apache-2.0. |
| Jan 2025 | Company registered in Ghent. Two support contracts, both still active. |
| Aug 2025 | Per-step row counts land in 0.10.0 and the product stops being a duration logger. |
| Mar 2026 | Sofie joins part-time. The documentation stops being a single long file. |
| Sep 2026 | Version 0.14.2 ships. Eleven support customers, none of them large. |
How many people run it
We genuinely do not know. There is no version check and nothing in the binary that calls home, so our only evidence is the mailing list, which has about forty teams on it, and the issue tracker. That is an uncomfortable way to run a company and a very comfortable way to be a piece of software inside somebody else's network.
What we are working on next
A step-level view of where time went inside a single long run, because the current per-step table is hard to read past about twenty steps. After that, probably nothing for a while: version 0.14.2 does what we set out to do in 2024, and the pages about what this will not become are a commitment rather than a disclaimer.
Mail goes to hello@slatepipe.cloud and is read by all three of us. Support customers have a separate address that is checked against the hours on the pricing page. We have no phone number, which has cost us exactly one deal and saved us a great deal of afternoon.