A product development company
We build software products. Ours, and yours.
Alto9 makes Spec9 and Kube9, and we help other lean teams get their own products out the door. Coding agents do a lot of the typing now. Someone still has to decide what's worth building and whether it came out right. That's where we spend most of our time.
Things we make
Two product lines right now. One for the people deciding what software should do, and one for the people keeping it running.
Early access Spec9
Where product and engineering meet.
A shared studio for the feature and the system. Product writes the behavior, engineering draws the architecture, and both end up in the same collection. Your coding agent reads it, builds from it, and checks its own work against it.
- Feature tree with Given, When, Then editing
- C4 diagrams that zoom from context down to components
- Live MCP server for Cursor, Claude, and Copilot
- The first 1,000 on the waitlist get it free for life
Available now Kube9
Kubernetes tools for the people who actually run the clusters.
Tools for developers and platform teams who spend their days in Kubernetes. Poke around your clusters from VS Code, run health checks inside the cluster, and stop juggling five terminal tabs to see what Argo CD is doing.
- VS Code extension for multi-cluster work
- Open-source operator for scheduled Well-Architected checks
- A dedicated desktop IDE, now in pre-release
Same playbook, whoever owns the product
We build our own products the way we would build yours. It goes roughly like this.
If the first two steps sound like a lot of docs and whiteboards to keep in sync, that's the problem Spec9 is meant to solve.
- 01
Write down the behavior
Before anyone opens an editor, we describe what the product should do in sentences a customer would recognize. It feels slow for about a day. After that it saves weeks.
- 02
Sketch the system
A rough architecture diagram settles a surprising number of arguments. We keep ours in C4, so you can zoom from the whole product down to the one service that matters right now.
- 03
Give agents a real spec
Coding agents are fast and very literal. Hand one a vague ticket and you get vague code back. Hand it the spec and the diagram, and the work gets much better.
- 04
Keep people on the hard calls
Agents write plenty of our code. People still review every change, own the architecture, and decide when something is actually done.
Need a product built, or a team that ships faster?
We take on a handful of client projects at a time. Sometimes that means turning a rough idea into a first version people can pay for. Other times we sit with an existing team and set up the agent workflows, review gates, and habits that make AI-written code safe to merge.
Either way, you keep the code and the know-how when we're done.
How engagements work →Got something you want to build?
Tell us what you're working on and where it's stuck. We'll write back with honest thoughts on whether we can help.