Correctness before surface area
It is easy to ship a long feature list and hard to ship a refund that reaches inventory, the ledger, compliance, and the audit trail without any of them disagreeing. We optimise for the second thing.
Company
Retail software for an industry that gets audited.
SMOKESTACK is being built for regulated cannabis retail specifically — not adapted from a general-purpose POS that later added an age gate.
Cannabis retail is an unusual software problem. The register has to be fast enough for a queue on a Friday evening, correct enough to survive a regulatory inspection, and resilient enough to keep selling when the building's internet drops. Most platforms are strong at one of those and improvise the rest.
The bet behind SMOKESTACK is that those three requirements are the same problem, and that they have to be solved in the foundation rather than in a feature. That is why the checkout workflow is shared between web and iPad instead of duplicated, why audit records are hash-chained rather than stored in an editable table, and why compliance rules compile to a versioned ruleset with tests instead of living in scattered conditionals.
It is a slower way to build. It is also the reason the honest answer to "can I sign up today" is still no.
How we build
Four commitments that shape the product.
These are not values on a wall. Each one costs us something specific.
Determinism where money and law are involved
Purchase limits and financial calculation run through deterministic engines with their own test suites. Same inputs, same answer — which is the only way an audit conversation stays short.
Offline is a design constraint, not a feature
A register that stops when the connection does is not a register. Local queuing and idempotent replay are part of the transaction model rather than a mode bolted on afterwards.
Say the unflattering thing early
We are pre-GA. We publish that on the homepage, in the FAQ, and on the demo page, because a design partner who finds out late is a design partner we deserve to lose.
Where things stand
Onboarding design partners.
SMOKESTACK is pre-general-availability. We are working directly with a small group of retailers to harden the platform in live operations before broader release.
See it running on real workflows.
Demos are run by our team in a dedicated demo environment, walked through live on a call — so you see the parts that matter to your operation, not a generic tour.