simplify.cochranblock.org — atsisbroken
Description: ATS is broken. So is the company that profits from it. atsisbroken — a free, open-source, local-first alternative to simplify.us. Unlicense. No cloud. No premium tier. No data harvesting.

simplify.cochranblock.org

# ATS is broken.
So is the company that profits from it.

atsisbroken — a free, open-source, local-first alternative to simplify.us. Unlicense. No cloud. No premium tier. No data harvesting. Forever.

## Why simplify.us blew up

Before we replace it, we have to understand it. Simplify Jobs (simplify.us / simplify.jobs) went from a 2020 YC seed to 1M+ job seekers and 100M+ tracked applications with a team of seven. They executed cleanly. Here's the recipe:

# | Move | Why it worked
--- | --- | ---
1 | Free forever core product | Autofill and tracking are free, indefinitely. Removes activation friction. Job seekers are price-elastic and broke.
2 | Browser extension distribution | One install, instant value on every supported job board. The extension is the product surface. No login wall to first value.
3 | Coverage of 100+ ATSes | 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 every form.
4 | Resume upload → profile auto-built | One-time onboarding cost. Profile is reused on every application. The cost-curve is an L-shape: high once, then zero.
5 | Multi-page autofill that doesn't stop | Modern Workday applications are 6-12 pages. Autofill that survives across pages is sticky. Users come back the next day.
6 | AI for short-answer questions | "Why do you want to work here?" is the differentiation problem. Auto-generated personalized answers from resume + job description solves it.
7 | Two-sided marketplace | Job seekers free; employers pay to post and promote. Premium tier (Simplify+) for power users. Classic B2B2C.
8 | YC + brand-name VCs | $4.35M raised across YC, Craft Ventures, Soma, Roar, Hyphen, Global Founders Capital. Credibility halo for the employer side and recruiting talent.
9 | Pain-point clarity | "Filling out 50 job applications is awful" is universal. No customer education needed.
10 | Team of 7 doing 1M users | High-leverage product, low ops. Margin discipline lets the free tier survive.

## What's fragile about the model

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.

- Cloud-first by design. 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.
- Account required. Sign-up before first value. A signal of where the product is being optimized: data capture.
- Data is the asset. 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.
- VC-backed runway equation. Growth requires ever-cheaper acquisition or ever-deeper monetization. The free tier is an acquisition strategy, not a thesis.
- No moat below the brand. 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.
- Closed source. No audit. No fork. No self-host. No way to verify what they do with your resume after upload.
- Premium tier expansion. 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.

## What atsisbroken does differently

The same product. Without the company. 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.

Axis | simplify.us | atsisbroken
--- | --- | ---
License | Closed source, Terms of Service | Unlicense — public domain, fork freely
Resume storage | Cloud (Simplify servers) | Local file on disk. Never uploaded.
Account required | Yes | No
Premium tier | Simplify+ (paid) | None. Forever.
Distribution | Chrome / Firefox extensions | Browser extension + native binary + CLI. WASM core.
AI personalization | Server-side proprietary | Bring-your-own-key (Claude / OpenAI / local Ollama). User chooses.
Cleared / regulated work | Cannot use (data residency) | Local-only mode. Fits cleared/healthcare/finance posture.
Data harvesting | 100M applications tracked centrally | Zero. Every user owns their data on their device.
Funding model | VC-backed, employer-paid, premium tier | None. Cochran Block. Anti-founder. Federal whistleblower-built.
Moat | Brand and bizdev partnerships | Open ATS adapter ecosystem. Anyone can ship a parser for a new ATS the day it launches.

## The thesis

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.

What it requires is one open-source repository and a handful of contributors who decided the entire category should be free.

That's atsisbroken.

## Status

Repository:github.com/cochranblock/atsisbroken Crate:`atsisbroken` — reserved on crates.io License:Unlicense Status:Scaffold. Specifications are being written; first ATS adapters next. Author:Michael Cochran — Cochran Block, LLC

## How to help

- Open the repository. Read the code. Audit it.
- 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.
- 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.