We build software and platforms.
Not slide decks.

Appetizer Labs is founder-led: Matthias Bruns delivers every engagement himself — cloud-native built daily, not just spelled. Based in Rhede, Münsterland, working with companies that mean business.

What we bring

// FOUNDER

How Appetizer Labs delivers

Four questions decide whether a supplier fits an engagement: Who actually does the work? Who carries the accountability? How much capacity is available? And what happens if that one person is unavailable? The answers are below — all of them, including the uncomfortable ones.

Founder-led

Every engagement is delivered by Matthias Bruns, founder and sole managing director of Appetizer Labs UG (haftungsbeschränkt), registered as HRB 21328 at Amtsgericht Coesfeld. The person in the first conversation is the person in the codebase. No sales layer that sells and no separate team that then delivers.

Specialists

There is no subcontractor network in the background. When a project needs expertise outside this scope — legal, data protection, specific product knowledge — that is said openly: the person is named and agreed in advance, or the engagement is not a fit.

Accountability

The contracting party is Appetizer Labs UG; the managing director is accountable. Even when specialists contribute, delivery accountability stays in exactly one place. Escalation here means going straight to the person who wrote the code.

Capacity

An engagement gets focus, not leftover calendar slots. That is why only a few projects run in parallel. Availability and weekly share are agreed before a proposal is written — including when the answer is: no slot right now.

Remote & on-site

Remote-first with teams across DACH. On-site work in North Rhine-Westphalia is available, typically for kick-offs, workshops and architecture sessions — wherever working in the same room beats another call.

Delivery risk

One person is a concentration risk. That is not talked away, it is planned for. Work happens in your repositories and infrastructure rather than in a black box, documentation and knowledge transfer run from day one, and work is cut into packages that each leave behind a usable state. After handover, your team carries on without Appetizer Labs.

What founder-led does not mean: no round-the-clock on-call, no SLA-backed operations, no scaling across several teams at once. Anyone who needs that needs a different supplier — and hears it here early rather than late.

Open source we work on

Public code is the one kind of proof nobody has to sign off on. What is linked here is the work that matches what we build — not the repositories with the most stars.

• Contribution

  Open Component Model

  Toolset for software supply chain and artifact provenance, Apache-2.0, built at SAP. This is where most of our open-source work lands: Go, Kubernetes, signing and delivery metadata.

  VIEW REPOSITORY →
• Contribution

  sigstore/cosign

  Container image signing, widely used in Kubernetes environments. One merged fix for a dependency CVE — not maintainership, a specific contribution.

  VIEW PULL REQUEST →

Our story