The story of how frustration with expensive, complex performance review tools led to building an open source alternative with AI assistance.
I run Tinify, an image optimization API company. Like most CEOs, I wanted to implement proper performance reviews for my team. The kind where people get honest feedback from peers, managers, and direct reports—360-degree reviews.
I looked at the usual suspects: Lattice, Culture Amp, 15Five. The pricing was absurd—€15,000-18,000 per year for a 50-person team. The features were bloated. The interfaces were cluttered. And worst of all, I'd be putting my team's sensitive feedback data on someone else's servers.
"When I couldn't find a tool that met these basic requirements without costing thousands per year, I decided to build it myself."
I'm the CEO of Tinify, a company that provides image optimization APIs used by millions of developers worldwide. Before that, I built and sold several tech startups.
I'm a serial entrepreneur who believes in building tools that solve real problems. Not tools that exist to justify VC funding rounds or support bloated sales teams. Tools that work, that you can trust, and that respect your data ownership.
I believe software should be:
Blik was built with significant assistance from Claude (Anthropic's AI). Not as a marketing gimmick, but because it genuinely made development faster and better.
Claude helped with:
This is the future of software development: humans providing vision and judgment, AI handling implementation details. The result is better code, shipped faster.
Initial version: ~3 weeks of focused development (evenings and weekends)
What normally would have taken months of solo development was compressed into weeks thanks to AI assistance. This meant I could validate the concept quickly and iterate based on real usage with my own team.
Blik is released under the AGPL license. This is deliberately copyleft—if you modify and host Blik, you must share your changes.
Why? Because performance review data is sensitive. You should be able to:
Self-hosted: Completely free. Download, deploy, use forever.
Managed hosting: €49-199/month depending on team size. This covers hosting costs, automatic updates, backups, and support. Transparent pricing, no sales calls.
The hosted version subsidizes development of the open source version. Everyone wins.
Performance reviews shouldn't cost €18,000/year for a small team. They shouldn't require giving your data to a third party. They shouldn't be so complex that you need training to use them.
Blik exists to prove that you can build professional-grade HR tools that are:
Whether you self-host or use our managed service, you're supporting a different way of building software. One that respects users, values transparency, and rejects vendor lock-in.
Questions? Feedback? Want to contribute? I'd love to hear from you.