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<div class="pretag">simplify.cochranblock.org</div>
<div class="hero">
<h1>ATS is broken.<br><span class="accent">So is the company that profits from it.</span></h1>
<p class="sub">atsisbroken — a free, open-source, local-first alternative to simplify.us. Unlicense. No cloud. No premium tier. No data harvesting. Forever.</p>
</div>
<h2>Why simplify.us blew up</h2>
<p>Before we replace it, we have to understand it. Simplify Jobs (simplify.us / simplify.jobs) went from a 2020 YC seed to <strong>1M+ job seekers</strong> and <strong>100M+ tracked applications</strong> with a team of seven. They executed cleanly. Here's the recipe:</p>
<table>
<tr><th>#</th><th>Move</th><th>Why it worked</th></tr>
<tr><td>1</td><td><strong>Free forever core product</strong></td><td>Autofill and tracking are free, indefinitely. Removes activation friction. Job seekers are price-elastic and broke.</td></tr>
<tr><td>2</td><td><strong>Browser extension distribution</strong></td><td>One install, instant value on every supported job board. The extension <em>is</em> the product surface. No login wall to first value.</td></tr>
<tr><td>3</td><td><strong>Coverage of 100+ ATSes</strong></td><td>Workday, Greenhouse, iCIMS, Taleo, Avature, Lever, SmartRecruiters. The pain of filling out the same form for the 50th time only ends if your tool covers <em>every</em> form.</td></tr>
<tr><td>4</td><td><strong>Resume upload → profile auto-built</strong></td><td>One-time onboarding cost. Profile is reused on every application. The cost-curve is an L-shape: high once, then zero.</td></tr>
<tr><td>5</td><td><strong>Multi-page autofill that doesn't stop</strong></td><td>Modern Workday applications are 6-12 pages. Autofill that survives across pages is sticky. Users come back the next day.</td></tr>
<tr><td>6</td><td><strong>AI for short-answer questions</strong></td><td>"Why do you want to work here?" is the differentiation problem. Auto-generated personalized answers from resume + job description solves it.</td></tr>
<tr><td>7</td><td><strong>Two-sided marketplace</strong></td><td>Job seekers free; employers pay to post and promote. Premium tier (Simplify+) for power users. Classic B2B2C.</td></tr>
<tr><td>8</td><td><strong>YC + brand-name VCs</strong></td><td>$4.35M raised across YC, Craft Ventures, Soma, Roar, Hyphen, Global Founders Capital. Credibility halo for the employer side and recruiting talent.</td></tr>
<tr><td>9</td><td><strong>Pain-point clarity</strong></td><td>"Filling out 50 job applications is awful" is universal. No customer education needed.</td></tr>
<tr><td>10</td><td><strong>Team of 7 doing 1M users</strong></td><td>High-leverage product, low ops. Margin discipline lets the free tier survive.</td></tr>
</table>
<h2>What's fragile about the model</h2>
<div class="pull danger">
Free forever depends on continued employer-side revenue. If the employer side flatlines, the free tier shrinks — or premium-tier walls climb. The next funding round will require monetization expansion. The "free forever" promise is a covenant only as strong as the runway.
</div>
<ul>
<li><strong>Cloud-first by design.</strong> Your resume, work history, salary expectations, and application targets sit on Simplify's servers. Cleared / government / healthcare / finance job seekers can't use it for compliance reasons.</li>
<li><strong>Account required.</strong> Sign-up before first value. A signal of where the product is being optimized: data capture.</li>
<li><strong>Data is the asset.</strong> 100M tracked applications across 1M users is the most valuable hiring-funnel dataset outside LinkedIn. Worth more to advertisers, recruiters, and acquirers than the SaaS revenue itself.</li>
<li><strong>VC-backed runway equation.</strong> Growth requires ever-cheaper acquisition or ever-deeper monetization. The free tier is an acquisition strategy, not a thesis.</li>
<li><strong>No moat below the brand.</strong> The technical moat — form-field detection across 100 ATSes — is a maintenance treadmill, not a defensible architecture. Anyone with the same maintenance discipline can replicate it.</li>
<li><strong>Closed source.</strong> No audit. No fork. No self-host. No way to verify what they do with your resume after upload.</li>
<li><strong>Premium tier expansion.</strong> Simplify+ exists. The arrow always points toward more features behind the wall, not fewer. The free tier is the loss leader; the next pricing change moves the line.</li>
</ul>
<h2>What atsisbroken does differently</h2>
<div class="pull win">
<strong>The same product. Without the company.</strong> Open source. Local-first. No account. No upload. No premium tier. Unlicense. Self-host the autofill engine on your laptop or push it through a wasm browser extension. Your resume never leaves your machine unless you tell it to.
</div>
<table>
<tr><th>Axis</th><th>simplify.us</th><th>atsisbroken</th></tr>
<tr><td>License</td><td>Closed source, Terms of Service</td><td><strong>Unlicense</strong> — public domain, fork freely</td></tr>
<tr><td>Resume storage</td><td>Cloud (Simplify servers)</td><td>Local file on disk. Never uploaded.</td></tr>
<tr><td>Account required</td><td>Yes</td><td>No</td></tr>
<tr><td>Premium tier</td><td>Simplify+ (paid)</td><td>None. Forever.</td></tr>
<tr><td>Distribution</td><td>Chrome / Firefox extensions</td><td>Browser extension + native binary + CLI. WASM core.</td></tr>
<tr><td>AI personalization</td><td>Server-side proprietary</td><td>Bring-your-own-key (Claude / OpenAI / local Ollama). User chooses.</td></tr>
<tr><td>Cleared / regulated work</td><td>Cannot use (data residency)</td><td>Local-only mode. Fits cleared/healthcare/finance posture.</td></tr>
<tr><td>Data harvesting</td><td>100M applications tracked centrally</td><td>Zero. Every user owns their data on their device.</td></tr>
<tr><td>Funding model</td><td>VC-backed, employer-paid, premium tier</td><td>None. Cochran Block. Anti-founder. Federal whistleblower-built.</td></tr>
<tr><td>Moat</td><td>Brand and bizdev partnerships</td><td>Open ATS adapter ecosystem. Anyone can ship a parser for a new ATS the day it launches.</td></tr>
</table>
<h2>The thesis</h2>
<p>simplify.us is a YC-shaped answer to a problem that doesn't need a YC-shaped answer. The product is a thin client over public form-field heuristics, fronted by a marketing site, sold to employers as a recruiting funnel. None of those ingredients require a startup, a Series A path, or 7 employees in San Francisco.</p>
<p>What it requires is one open-source repository and a handful of contributors who decided the entire category should be free.</p>
<p>That's atsisbroken.</p>
<h2>Status</h2>
<div class="kv">
<span class="k">Repository:</span><span class="v"><a href="https://github.com/cochranblock/atsisbroken">github.com/cochranblock/atsisbroken</a></span>
<span class="k">Crate:</span><span class="v"><code>atsisbroken</code> — reserved on crates.io</span>
<span class="k">License:</span><span class="v">Unlicense</span>
<span class="k">Status:</span><span class="v">Scaffold. Specifications are being written; first ATS adapters next.</span>
<span class="k">Author:</span><span class="v">Michael Cochran — Cochran Block, LLC</span>
</div>
<h2>How to help</h2>
<ul>
<li>Open the repository. Read the code. Audit it.</li>
<li>Pick an ATS that simplify.us supports (Workday, Greenhouse, iCIMS, Taleo, Avature, Lever, SmartRecruiters) and ship an adapter. Each adapter is a small, self-contained module.</li>
<li>If you've been ATS-screened out for being a parent, a veteran, a person with a disability, a federal whistleblower, or anyone else the system filters before a human reads your resume — this is for you. File issues. Tell us what's broken.</li>
</ul>
<div class="footer">
<p>cochranblock.org · <a href="https://cochranblock.org">apex</a> · <a href="https://github.com/cochranblock/atsisbroken">repo</a> · Unlicense · Anti-founder thesis</p>
<p style="margin-top: 0.6rem; color: var(--fg3);">ATS is broken. So is the company that profits from it. We are not.</p>
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