The tools make the money. The money makes the science free.
Biniru Projects is a one-person studio in Borgerhout, Antwerp, with an AI crew that helps carry the weight. The mission is a single sentence. The rest is architecture in service of that sentence.
Soren Van Krunckelsven
Born in 1988, raised in Boom, currently living and working in Borgerhout. No diploma. No formal training. In institutional care until the age of eighteen. Got a stage keyboard in primary school — not producing yet, but it laid the foundation for everything that came after. The actual production started later, on Goa-trance sketchy download sites at a time when most kids his age were trading Pokémon cards. Stopped producing publicly around 2017 and moved into tooling, research, and system design. Alongside all of that: was part of building Tomorrowland from 2005 onward — walked in, asked to help, stayed. After turning eighteen, spent years with Roadrunner building stages across Belgium: Sportpaleis, Bozar, De Vooruit, every major festival. Hauled Leonard Cohen's rig, picked up Black Eyed Peas and U2 gear off Oostende airport, laid floors under U2's Claw, struck winter Christmas markets between tours. Once smoked a joint with Aerosmith's drummer during an extra soundcheck. Paid badly, hours were long, one of the most interesting jobs ever worked.
The thing Soren is unusually good at is seeing patterns that other people don't stop to look at. Biniru is an attempt to turn that pattern-recognition into a catalogue of useful software and an ongoing body of independent research.
Smart is not what you're taught. Smart is what you see when nobody told you where to look. Slim is niet wat je leert. Slim is wat je ziet als niemand je verteld heeft waar je moet kijken. Soren
Local-first. Always.
Every Biniru tool is built to run on the user's own hardware. The reasons are simple: things you host yourself cannot be turned off by someone else, things that run locally cannot leak data you didn't share, and things you pay for once cannot be retroactively locked behind a new paywall.
This is not a tech-lifestyle choice. This is the baseline. If a tool needs a server, it runs on hardware Biniru controls, in Europe, on its own metal. There is no AWS. There is no Google Cloud. There is no Azure. There is no Vercel. There is a Pi, a mini PC, a colocated rack, and eventually a small room in Antwerp with some fans running.
What this rules out
- SaaS dependencies
- Cloud storage of user data
- Third-party telemetry
- US-jurisdiction payment processors
- Investor-driven scale pressure
- Free-forever tiers that exist to harvest data
No rounds. No dilution. No exit.
Biniru is self-funded by design. There are no investors. There is no venture capital. There is no plan to sell the company. Every licence sold is split between two buckets: one pays for the next tool, one pays for the next paper. When a tool becomes profitable, the profit is visible, attributable, and directly reinvested.
The reason is not romantic. It is structural. Investor-backed companies eventually have to optimise for the investor, and the investor does not want local-first. They want SaaS. They want recurring revenue. They want the user data. They want the lock-in. Biniru cannot deliver those things and also deliver the mission, so Biniru does not take their money.
No carnival pricing. Round numbers. Always.
Our prices don't end in 9. No €19, no €99, no €4,999. Not €9.99 either, and especially not €9.95 or €10.99. A €1 difference isn't a difference — it's a psychological trick to make you buy faster. Your brain reads "twenty euros" as "nineteen" because the first digit is a 1. Marketers know this, software companies know this, supermarkets know this. Everyone plays along.
We don't.
Belgium took 1¢ and 2¢ coins out of circulation — cashiers round to the nearest 5 cents anyway, so the cents themselves are now make-believe. The €9.99 sticker is doubly absurd: even the cents aren't real money anymore. But the prices still end in 9. Because it was never about money. It was always about the trick.
Our prices are round numbers because that's what they are. €3, €5, €20, €100, €5000. No costume numbers. No subliminal pressure. You know exactly what you're paying and why. Fits the rest of Biniru: no telemetry, no data-resale, no subscription you can't escape, no hidden Stripe fees. Honest price. Honest deal.
Things that shouldn't need permission.
The second half of the mission runs in parallel with the tools. Biniru writes scientific papers on topics that conventional academia either cannot or will not publish: digital-entanglement social systems, cognitive excellence, the ethics of borders, the architecture of consciousness, phosphorus substrates. Some of it is speculative. Some of it is rigorous. Some of it is both. All of it is open.
But science is only one lane. The same principle applies to nature — think of the Rupel-region sanitation, where tonnes of historical asbestos and industrial waste are still sitting in the ground. Or Rivierenhof's roof-maintenance fund when it needs extra support. Any ecological repair work that falls between institutional cracks.
And to community — the little square (pleintje) where the local kids play, here in Borgerhout. An Erik in the US who wants to buy a building to run community work out of it, across an ocean. Neighbours and strangers who need a thing done that nobody's paying for. Local and international at the same time, depending on who shows up and what they need.
The tools fund all of it. None of it requires permission, paperwork, or grant approval. That is the whole contract.
I remove the noise of the world. Ik haal de ruis van de wereld weg. Soren, core metaphor
Hard lines. No negotiation.
- No pornography. No graphic violence. No CSAM. Zero tolerance, perceptual-hash detection in every communication product Biniru ever ships.
- No investor influence on ethics. Not applicable — there are no investors.
- AI disclosure on every piece of output that involved AI generation. Subtle, small, transparent, non-negotiable.
- User data stays with the user. Biniru does not receive, store, or process personal data beyond what is strictly needed for licence delivery.
- RAW vs VALIDATED content separation in any tool that produces or aggregates information. If an ethical filter detects drift toward harm, the tool stops.
/.MitD — Made in the Dark.
Biniru runs a small music label: /.MitD. Same principle as the tools — no streaming-feed algorithm, no fractions of a cent per play. Released through Bandcamp because Bandcamp pays the artist directly and lets the listener actually keep the file.
First release: MitD Guitar Gods. More to come.
That is the project.
If any of this resonates, the next useful thing you can do is either pick up a tool or read a paper. Tools are free to download — optional tier-unlocks fund the next round of work. Papers stay free to read, always.
Biniru is in pre-launch. Official start begins when monthly revenue crosses €2k. Until then, everything is being built in public, one honest step at a time.