Pledge
Our pledge.
Giving back
Made in Michigan, on the Great Lakes. Five percent of every sale goes back to them.
Kiln is made in Michigan, the Great Lakes State, on the largest system of fresh surface water on Earth. So 5% of every sale goes to the Alliance for the Great Lakes, which has worked to protect the lakes for over fifty years, from clean drinking water to beach cleanups. This is in an effort to cover any AI or non-AI data center usage.
We tally sales at the end of each month and pay it then. The running total and the receipts are posted here as they happen.
Our roadmap also includes rotating donations to various nonprofits in Southeast Michigan. If you would like to stay up to date, subscribe to our newsletter.
How it was made
We're musicians, not software engineers. We decided what every plugin should do, how it should sound and look, and what problem in our own recordings it had to solve. Then we tested each one in real sessions, by ear, until it fit our vision.
The code was written with the help of Claude Code, Anthropic's AI coding assistant, based on that vision. It wrote the sound engines, the tests that check them, the installer and this site. We listened, organized and prioritized our changes and kept going until it was right. A primary factor for using Claude Code to help was to make this suite as lightweight and efficient as possible. Everything is documented, organized and as streamlined as possible, in order to give you the best experience we can.
We'd rather be transparent than leave you to wonder.
The footprint
Even at our high estimate, everything it took to make Kiln comes to less energy than firing one load of pots.
| Energy | CO₂e | Water | |
|---|---|---|---|
| All of Kiln's AI work, start to nowEstimate: see how we worked it out, below. | 3–50 kWh | 1–19 kg | 7–230 L |
| All 37 Mac buildsAbout 11 hours of build-machine time in total. | 0.3–0.7 kWh | 0.1–0.3 kg | under 3 L |
| This websiteStatic pages; no servers running all day. | a few Wh a month | under 0.1 kg | – |
| One handmade mug's share of firingIts slot in a 30-mug kiln load, bisque and glaze firing. | about 4 kWh | about 1.5 kg | – |
| One kiln load: bisque and glaze firingA mid-size electric kiln, fired to cone 6. | about 125 kWh | about 46 kg | – |
Estimates as of November 2026. We'll update them as Kiln grows.
How we worked it out
AI work. Anthropic doesn't publish energy per request, so we estimated. The project took roughly 3,000 to 10,000 requests to the model, most of them re-reading a long working context. We used 0.5 to 5 Wh per request: above Google's published median of 0.24 Wh for a short text prompt, because coding requests are far longer. Carbon uses the US grid average (about 0.37 kg CO₂e per kWh). Water counts data-center cooling plus the water used to generate the electricity (about 2 to 4.5 L per kWh).
Builds. 37 runs of our Mac build, about 11 hours in total, at an assumed 30 to 60 W for the build machine and its share of the data center.
Pottery. A mid-size electric kiln uses about 50 kWh for a bisque firing and 75 kWh for a cone 6 glaze firing. Clay, glaze materials and transport aren't included, so the real figure is higher.
Keeping it small
Tested before it's built
Every change runs through fast tests on a small Linux machine first. The Mac build, the expensive part, only runs once those pass.
Many fixes per build
We batch fixes so each Mac build carries as many as possible: 37 builds for twenty plugins, an installer and a menu-bar app.
Nothing built without a reason
No build runs on its own schedule. Each one is asked for, on purpose.
A light website
Plain pages and one small video, served from a static host. Nothing runs in between visits.