LeanZero's first year: four Forge apps on the Atlassian Marketplace

LeanZero really started because Gabriela and I have both been working for consultancy companies all of our lives, and we've seen way too much that goes wrong, so we went and did our own thing. In December 2025 our website went live with a portfolio page headlined "Things I've Built (and Things I'm Building)". Ten months later the two of us have four Forge apps on the Atlassian Marketplace and we're shipping them like crazy. Everything LeanZero does ends up on that website. It's our showcase, so the best way I know to tell you about our first year is to show you how the site grew up :)

On 17 October I had our AI agents rewind it: ten old commits, each checked out in its own folder and run on localhost, from the end of December 2025 to early October (yes, the agents did the time travel, I just asked). The repo went from 22 commits at the end of December to 2,080 by mid-October, merges not counted.

Why LeanZero has a website at all

So what did we see go wrong? The mediocrity that companies hire, for a start, and the people that just go by the Romanian saying "Timpul trece, leafa merge", roughly "time passes, the salary keeps coming": you show up, you wait out the clock and you get paid regardless. And then the major deficiencies companies suffer from because of poor overall management and decisions from people who are just sitting it out till their retirement, too afraid to lose their comfy space (and no, it's not about age, it's about being afraid to move).

LeanZero's prices are small and they stay small, because we don't need lots of people to operate. It's true we use AI, but we've made it a true tool and not some slop. We don't work with 15-minute prompts, we work with hunks of experience distilled into skills and practices that make AI into a formidable tool. We've been looking at it and our estimate is that me and Gabriela can easily operate at the same level as a 50-70 people company. Nobody audited it, mind you. But look at what the two of us put out this year: four apps on the Marketplace, a practice exam bank we both studied on, a benchmark board where models have to build a real app, and 150-plus articles. The reach isn't there yet, our clicks are still tiny. But our tenacity and our ability to innovate know no bounds. We're still learning and evolving, plenty hungry for knowledge and experience even after more than 15 years of doing mostly the same things.

It's true AI has invigorated the scene, and it's extremely fun to see people take a dump on AI. Used poorly it's slop no doubt, we see it on a day to day basis with people asking: why can't my AI see pictures in Confluence? And then we show them how we have it set up and guess what? For us it works first try (come and ask us on Discord and we'll show you). I think AI as it is won't be replacing hardcore veterans like ourselves, but it will replace the vast sea of mediocrity for sure.

So why a website? Because I could brag about our stuff all day long. Don't take my word for it, go and poke at it: free practice exams, free MCP keys, a demo site, a benchmark board, articles with the real error messages left in. And the biggest piece is on the Marketplace, where CogniRunner's first public version went up in March under the LeanZero SRL name. There are four Forge apps listed now:

1. CogniRunner, AI workflow validators and agents for Jira, running on your own AI key or on Atlassian's Forge LLM.
2. Sentinel Vault, document control for Confluence: sealed attachments and page sections, approvals, classification.
3. LeanZero Management, Microsoft Project-style Gantt charts and planning on Jira issues, free.
4. Cost Slasher, Atlassian licence management for admins who pay for seats nobody uses, still a beta.

Here's how it went. I won't dress the numbers up, they're small.

From "Things I've Built" to 150-plus articles: how leanzero.net changed

Our git history starts on 19 November 2025 with one single commit of 229 files, the whole first site in one go, so whatever came before it isn't in this repo. On 27 December I added the AWS Amplify deploy, and then made ten fix: commits that same day trying to get it to build. One of them is literally called "completely rewrite amplify.yml", and the Sanity client went lazy twice. More build fixes followed on the 28th and the 30th. Merry Christmas to me.

That first version said "Atlassian Expertise, Made Personal" next to a glass cube with the Atlassian logo in it. The text under it said "I help teams simplify their Atlassian ecosystems", and the second button said "See What I've Built". It didn't even live on leanzero.net! It ran on a subdomain of someone else's domain. The team page with both of us on it came on 26 February, but the portfolio kept saying I for much, much longer.

Well, in May the pages got what the commit calls the "AI Builds signature DNA": section numbers, blueprint dot grids, and yes, tinted left accent bars on the cards (those went in June). Two days later came corner brackets and a little "REV 2.6" stamp in the top right corner, and the rest stayed until September.

In June the site got its first free things you could try right on it. Our two MCP servers (one does web search, one reads documents for your AI) got pages with free demo keys you can grab in seconds, and a Rubik's cube replaced the glass one. That cube has had a lot of makeovers since, one more on 16 October.

On 1 August we finally moved to leanzero.net, where the commit message says the old subdomain had earned 60 organic clicks in six months. On 16 August I put a whole band of prices right under the hero, "Senior work, honest numbers". The next day the first run went up on the benchmark board. Models build a real app there inside our own fork of Goose, an open-source AI agent (yes we have a fork, it's because we heavily modified it for our own use case), and get scored on what they actually shipped. By mid-October it had 170 published runs across 64 models.

On 7 September came the free practice exams for all five ACP certifications (the Atlassian Certified Professional ones). By mid-October the site counted 3,138 questions. Both of us used that question bank for our own ACPs (I was building it while studying for mine). Gabriela holds more Atlassian certifications than I do by now. On the day the exams went up we went through the site again and threw most of it out. It didn't look bad, but it screamed that a machine had designed the page (yes, from people whose agents write most of the commits, I know). Nobody asked us to and the old one worked fine, but sitting on something that works is exactly the comfy space I was talking about. The same pass deleted filler copy and stats nobody could source, and the stock icons went too. So did the rate card, three weeks after I'd put it up. It read like a cash grab (the €50 an hour stayed in the hero line, no retainer).

In October came the demo site. You request access and get your own admin account on our shared Jira and Confluence demo site, with three of our apps installed, for five days, and your own instance stays clean. It went on the home page on 5 October, the day before Atlassian Team '26 Europe started in Amsterdam, where we went with no stand and no talk slot, two slightly awkward people still practising the five-minute pitch. The braindates there (small meetups that attendees book with each other) got us feedback on all three apps, and we shipped fixes while we were still there.

And the "Things I've Built" part? It survived every redesign until 15 October 2026 (in June the tail got shortened to "(and Building)"). Below it in December there was a row called Partner Projects, and our own row underneath was still placeholders. Now the same page says "Products we've built". Products, plural, from two people!

And look at that last bar, 1,399 commits in the first 17 days of October against 10 in the whole of May! Most of that is the AI agents we work with, committing in small checked steps. About 450 of those commits went into the 3D cube and the hero, plus the lighting effects across the site (told you it had a lot of makeovers, I wanted it right, sue me). The product pages took about 120 and the benchmark board about 110. I'm proud of that bar anyway.

On 17 October we were at 153 articles, 100 of them from the two months before. 47 carry Gabriela's name, including the very first one on 19 January. We split it like this. I build the apps and the tooling. Gabriela does configuration, testing, research and documentation, and she answers people on the Atlassian Community. So don't let the "Things I've Built" headline fool you, this was always the two of us.

Our first Forge app on the Marketplace under our own name: CogniRunner's last two months

CogniRunner got its own page on 27 February. Look at it, it's adorable:

AI-powered workflow validation for Jira, open source on GitHub, powered by OpenAI, and that was the whole app. Its first public version on the Marketplace was 2.0.0, on 9 March 2026. And then we kept having ideas, and they all turned into "BUT WHAT IF WE DID THIS?", and so it learned conditions and post-functions, then listeners and scheduled jobs, then your own AI provider or a local model or Forge LLM with no key at all, then a Coder that turns an issue into a pull request. And then my favourite one: what if I'm the sole Jira admin and I go on vacation, who takes my spot?! That one became the Virtual Administrators, AI agents that work a service desk queue for you, and it's the most potent thing we've built, hands down.

And we ship it a lot: 31 of its 34 public versions came out in the two months to 17 October, 24 of them in October alone. Across all four apps it's 130 of 138. Mind you it's not perfect and I'm sure you will find bugs, but the value is real, so tell us when you find them.

29 installs and 9 reviews, and what they don't mean yet

For most of this year CogniRunner had zero reviews and was pretty obscure. In early September we ran a workshop and let people playtest it while it was still raw. A few days later, on 8 September, seven reviews came in within a few hours, then one more on the 15th and another on 7 October. Nine reviews, all five stars, and I'm very grateful to every one of those people. Would they have found it without that workshop? I don't know yet, ask me again next October.

On 17 October the listing showed 29 installs, and at least one of those is our own test site. It was 30 on 15 October, so it goes down too. Here are all four apps side by side, read off the Marketplace on 17 October:

So please don't read those install counters as paying customers. The site is small too. Search Console shows 19 clicks in August and 25 in September, then 41 in just the first half of October, from 2,939 impressions. I know these numbers are tiny next to the big partners. For a nobody company from Romania, it's starting to show promise.

What the second year has to prove: first real users beyond our own circle

Mostly I want real users to start coming from beyond the people we've met. CogniRunner keeps getting sharper with every bug we find, and I hope with yours from the demo site. Cost Slasher is still a beta, and its automatic release of unused licences comes switched off, so you switch it on only after you've checked it on your own site (I wrote about the free way to find inactive users next to it). And I'm most excited about the local models. Our Qwen3.8 models tuned for Atlassian work are on the portfolio and the benchmark board keeps throwing them at real builds. If we can make a model that runs on your own hardware and knows Jira, well, then it gets fun.

Go and break something on the demo site, or read how we built AI validators with Forge LLM. Both of us are on the team page. Write to office@leanzero.net and it gets to the two of us directly, or come and chat on Discord (link in the footer). Let me know your thoughts. Oh, and the prices stay ludicrously low :)