"A rhetorical trope is when you say one thing and mean another. We named the company this before we realized it would describe most of our product roadmaps."
Rhetorical Trope is a small holding company for a handful of software products built by people who spend too much time thinking about problems no one asked them to solve. We make tools for IT consultants, families, nonprofits, pet owners, and telecom operators — not because there’s a grand unified thesis, but because each one seemed like a genuinely good idea at 10pm on a Tuesday.
A PSA platform purpose-built for independent IT consultants. Track clients, time, projects, and service history without paying enterprise prices for a tool that assumes you employ 400 people.
Pet health management for people who treat their animals like members of the family — because they are. Vet records, medication tracking, and health history in one place so you’re not hunting through a drawer of crumpled paperwork at 11pm.
A family coordination app built for actual families — meaning chaos, varying ages, different schedules, and the eternal question of what’s for dinner. Calendars, chores, shared notes, and a little bit of hope.
E-Rate bid intelligence for telecom and ISP providers navigating the federal schools and libraries program. The program moves billions of dollars a year through a procurement process that is, charitably, opaque. We’re making it less so.
Nonprofit donor management that doesn’t require a six-week onboarding and a dedicated staff member to operate. Small organizations deserve good software too — and they definitely can’t afford Salesforce.
We are not a venture-backed startup optimizing for a Series B. We’re a small shop with an LLC, a shared Figma account, and a sincere belief that most software is worse than it needs to be.
Each product in the Rhetorical Trope portfolio started the same way: someone encountered a problem, looked at the existing solutions, said “these are all bad,” and then spent several months building something better. We have no illusions that this is a novel origin story. It’s just ours.
The name “Rhetorical Trope” is admittedly a little precious. A trope is a figure of speech — a way of saying something obliquely, of approaching a thing from an unexpected angle. That felt right. We build for underserved niches, overlooked users, and problems the big players have decided aren’t worth their time.
We are not embarrassed that our products don’t share a market category. An IT consultancy tool and a pet health app have nothing to do with each other, and we’re at peace with that. Ideas don’t require permission to coexist in the same LLC.
Big software companies build for big customers. We deliberately build for the people they ignore — the solo consultant, the small nonprofit, the family that doesn’t fit the demographic model. Smaller markets mean less competition and more meaningful products.
We believe in getting working software in front of real users early and iterating aggressively. A version 1 in someone’s hands beats a version 0 in a planning document. We are comfortable shipping things that are imperfect and uncomfortable shipping things that are perfect but imaginary.
We build products that pay for themselves. Not because we’re incurious about mission-driven work, but because sustainable software requires sustainable economics. We charge fair prices for real value and we don’t apologize for either.