About STRICH

👋 Hi, I'm Alex, the developer of STRICH Barcode Scanning SDK.

I've been writing software for a variety of companies for over two decades, as a student, full-time employee, freelancer and eventually owner of a small software development agency. I later scaled back to focus on what I love most — building software — and founded Pixelverse LLC, the umbrella company for all my current ventures.

I have a Master's degree in Computer Science from ETH Zurich and I'm passionate about software and all things visual.

Why I built STRICH

At some point during my agency time, I started writing barcode scanning apps, using both state-of-the-art commercial offerings with license costs in the tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars, and Open Source libraries which needed a lot of DIY work and were unmaintained for years. That is when I perceived a gap between the two, and I decided to build my own barcode scanning library, in the midst of the COVID pandemic.

Another frustration of mine was that most of my customers believed that they needed a native app, when in fact a web app would have been perfectly fine, and would have been much easier to maintain, especially for in-house or B2B apps. I've seen apps thrown out of the App Store simply because nobody bothered to check an email alias.

That's why I decided to build STRICH exclusively for the web, from the ground up. My goal for STRICH is to build the best library for in-browser barcode scanning. It does not intend to displace the state-of-the-art solutions, but to provide a lightweight and easy-to-use alternative that works for the vast majority of use cases and runs on a wide variety of devices.

STRICH is a bootstrapped, profitable business fully owned by me. Sometimes people are surprised that a single person can build a product and operate a business on their own, and they ask questions like "what happens when you are gone?". All I can say to that is that I am fully committed to STRICH, love working on it and am financially dependent on the income it generates. Also keep in mind that just because a company is big doesn't guarantee its product will always be around — just take a stroll through the Google Graveyward, for example.

Future Development

I'm excited to continue adding features that improve the library for all users, take advantage of new capabilities of the web platform (besides just keeping up with browser updates!) and try new approaches that lend themselves to real-time barcode recognition in constrained environments like web browsers. I do not plan to port STRICH to other platforms, as I believe in a strong and capable web platform that can be used to build all kinds of applications, outside of the walled gardens.

I'm not ruling out growing the company and hiring other people to work on STRICH, but for now it's mostly me and I intend to keep it that way for the foreseeable future. If you see that as a risk, this product is probably not for you, and you might be better served by an alternative, of which there are several.

Thank you for reading this! ❤️