Lithos — tools for community service

About

Small organisations run on volunteers and borrowed equipment. The software they are offered is usually built for someone else — priced per seat, hosted somewhere they cannot see, and shaped around a business that needs them to keep paying.

Lithos exists for the other case. Everything here is made for community service: the work of gathering people, teaching them, feeding them, and translating for them. It is meant to be installed once by whoever is willing, and then to stay out of the way for years.

Not a company looking for a market. A place to put the tools as they get built, so the next congregation or charity does not have to build them again.

What's here

One so far. More as they get built — this page is the shelf, not the product.

Lithos Translate

Live translation for your community. One person speaks; everyone hears and reads their own language, on their own phone, over your WiFi.

Captions on a projector wall, audio to earbuds, room speakers and per-room output boxes, breakout classes with their own languages, and a way for the congregation to speak back. Runs from a laptop, a mini-PC, or a Raspberry Pi in a closet.

translate.lithos.community →

How everything here is built

It runs on your hardware. A laptop in the back of the room, a mini-PC, a Raspberry Pi in a cupboard. What your people say and do stays on your network.
Free for non-commercial use, permanently. Congregations, charities and classrooms pay nothing. Commercial use is what carries a licence.
No account, no telemetry, no lock-in. Nothing phones home. Where an outside service is genuinely needed you bring your own key, and what it costs is visible while you spend it.
Built for the person who did not volunteer for this. Whoever ends up running it is usually not technical, is already busy, and cannot stop to debug while a room full of people waits. That constrains every design decision.
Honest about what it cannot do. Limits, running costs and rough edges belong in the documentation, not in the middle of the event you were relying on it for.
Built once, then left alone. These are tools for organisations without an IT department. Installed by whoever is willing, and expected to keep working for years without attention.

Get in touch

Using one of these at your organisation, or want to help build the next one — hello@lithos.community.