This is not gallery software
There's a whole category of software called "art management," and almost all of it is really gallery management: inventory as a sales pipeline, contacts as a CRM, artists as a roster the gallery administers. The artist is a line item in someone else's system.
1BURO is not that. It's built for the person making the work, and for the independent scene around them — curators, artist-run spaces, small non-profits, festivals. Not the gallery as a market.
That sounds like a marketing distinction. It's actually an architectural one, and it shows up everywhere.
Who the account belongs to
In gallery software, the gallery owns the account and the data; artists get a view, if that. In 1BURO the artist owns the account. Their inventory, CV, exhibitions and provenance live in their space. When an organiser needs access — to build a show, to pull a checklist — that happens through an explicit, revocable grant, on the artist's terms, not by default.
The organiser is a real, first-class kind of account too. But there's no sub-taxonomy of "gallery" versus "everyone else," because the independent scene doesn't sort that cleanly. A curator, a non-profit, an artist-run space, a collective, a festival — they're all just an organiser, collaborating across accounts they don't own.
What we optimise for
Because the artist is the customer, the incentives point differently:
- Seats are free. We never charge per head. Adding a collaborator, an assistant, an organiser should never be a line item — the money comes from storage and AI usage, never from headcount.
- Portability is a feature, not a leak. Gallery software fears the artist leaving. We ship the exit.
- Getting found is your value, not just ours. Your public site is built to be discoverable — the point is people finding your work, not us harvesting an audience.
Why it matters to funders
If you fund independent art — a residency, a project grant, a public commission — you are, in effect, investing in artists' capacity to keep working and to account for what they've done. Tools that lock that record inside a commercial gallery's systems work against that. A tool the artist owns, can export, and can self-host keeps the funded work legible for the long term, regardless of which galleries come and go.
The short version
Gallery software asks: how does the gallery run its business? We ask a different question: what does the artist need to own, forever, no matter who they work with?
Answer that honestly and you don't build gallery software. You build this.