384 applications (and counting). 3 callbacks. Here’s what got built instead.

That’s not a typo. That’s not a fluke. That’s what months of doing everything “right” — tailored resumes, cover letters, following up, playing the game exactly as advertised — actually got back in return. Almost nothing. Not rejection, even. Silence, mostly: 154 of those applications simply went dark and got auto-archived after 90 days of no response at all. Another 47 came back auto-rejected within a week, some inside 48 hours — a bot’s decision, not a person’s. Out of 384 applications, exactly three ever reached a human being far enough to sit down for an interview and get told no to your face. Three.

That would have been enough on its own. But it wasn’t happening in isolation — it was happening during the exact stretch of sitting through back-to-back meetings that could’ve been an email, because somewhere along the way “stillness” got mistaken for “commitment” and nobody questioned it. And it was happening right before a health scare made the cost of all that sitting impossible to ignore. The doctors were clear about the pattern: office workers, long-haul truckers, anyone stuck in a chair for hours on end shows up in these cases more than most. The body keeps score, even when the org chart doesn’t.

Two broken systems, grinding on at the same time. The easy thing to do is absorb it, the way everyone’s told to. The other option is to get angry enough to build something instead.

So — today, that something is live.

Workers’ Rebellion started as a reaction, not a business plan. The first thing built wasn’t a product on a shelf — it was a job search tracker, because before anything else could get fixed, the pattern itself had to be visible: which applications got auto-rejected inside 48 hours, which got ghosted outright, which ever actually reached a person. Data instead of guessing. That tracker is live today at $20 — five bucks off the regular price (20% off), running through the end of September. Built the way everything here gets built — real requirements, real QA, no budget to pretend otherwise.

Most job trackers are just a kanban board with columns for “Applied,” “Interview,” “Offer.” That tells you what happened. It doesn’t tell you why. This one categorizes every rejection by type — automated within 48 hours, automated within a week, rejected after a period where a human may have reviewed it (there’s no way to know for certain), rejected after an actual screen or interview, or simply ghosted past the 90-day mark — so the pattern above isn’t a guess, it’s a number you can pull up any time. It tracks which resume version went to which application and shows the rejection rate per version, so “is my ATS-formatted resume actually working better” stops being a guess too. It flags anything sitting stale past 90 days and lets you archive it as ghosted in one click instead of it just cluttering an active list forever. It has a place to mark applications as reported to your state’s unemployment office, since that’s a real, recurring requirement for anyone job-hunting while collecting benefits and it’s one more thing most trackers never think about. And everything lives in your own browser — no account, no signup, no third party holding your job search data hostage in exchange for “insights.”

Also live today: the Aligned Charitable Organizations page — a growing list of groups doing work we believe in, across labor, human rights, climate, veterans’ support, sex workers’ rights, and international solidarity. No formal partnerships yet, no money moving through us to any of them yet — just links to each organization’s own homepage, so anyone who wants to support them can look them over and find their way to a donation directly, on the organization’s own terms. Outreach to every organization on that list has begun: each one is being given the choice to stay listed as-is, ask to be removed entirely, or be considered as a formal partner organization once we reach Phase 4 and profit-sharing actually begins. This isn’t a list anyone ends up on without knowing it, and nobody’s locked into anything beyond it. That’s Phase 1. Full financial honesty is the plan for every phase after it, published on a schedule, not just when it’s flattering.

There’s more in motion beyond software. We know what it is. We’re not naming it yet, on purpose — a small brand that announces its plans before the legal groundwork is in place is just handing a roadmap to whoever wants to beat it to the punch. What we will say: it’s real, it’s coming, and every step gets published the moment it’s actually ready to be.

There’s a manifesto behind this — eleven core values, no exceptions, no cherry-picking. That’s the actual foundation this gets built on, not a mission statement bolted on after the fact. If you want the full list, read the manifesto. If you want the real numbers behind how the money works, that’s public too.

None of this is a startup pitch dressed up as a cause. It’s a straightforward reaction to watching a broken system grind down qualified people — before they’re hired, and after — and being told that’s just how it works.

It doesn’t have to be. Today’s the day this actually starts proving that.