Author

Ermars Castar

CTO, Fludigo

CTO at Fludigo. Backend architect and systems lead — writes about distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, and the engineering tradeoffs most teams skip.

4 posts · All posts

A loose grid of roughly forty small app-icon tiles scattered across white, each with a different abstract glyph, all disconnected — and one centre tile filled in vivid orange, with broken dashed lines reaching outward toward neighbours that never connect.

insights·ISSUE 004·07 APR 2026

42 SaaS Tools and Nothing Works Together

The average small company uses 42 SaaS apps. SaaS costs per employee hit $9,100/year. Half those licences are unused. Here's the real cost of tool sprawl.

Ermars Castar

product·ISSUE 003·28 MAR 2026

Introducing RUBL — Sales on Autopilot

RUBL is our revenue intelligence platform that unifies CRM, AI marketing, and automated product demos. Here's what it does and why we built it.

Ermars Castar

An editorial still-life on white — a charcoal silhouette of a steak on the lower-left, a small salt cellar above and to its right, with a scatter of vivid orange salt grains drifting from the cellar onto the steak's surface — visualising AI as the seasoning, not the meal.

engineering·ISSUE 002·26 MAR 2026

AI Is the Salt, Not the Steak

88% of organisations use AI. Only 6% extract real value. 60% of AI initiatives will be abandoned by 2026. Here's why most AI products are lying to you.

Ermars Castar

An iconographic multi-tool splayed open on white — a charcoal central body with six arms fanning outward, three crisp and complete, three visibly broken (one stunted, one bent, one drawn only in dashed outline) — and a small orange warning marker beside the most broken arm.

engineering·ISSUE 001·22 MAR 2026

The All-in-One Platform Trap: Lessons from Bitrix, Odoo, and Zoho

You can do everything in Bitrix24 — just not well. Why all-in-one platforms fail, what Odoo took 10 years to learn, and how to build without the trap.

Ermars Castar