I want to be exact about what the number is, because Stow is a tool for people who care about exact numbers. Since the download counter started on 6 August, the two download buttons on this site have been pressed 516 times: 368 for the Mac build and 148 for Windows. Automated visits, retries and resumed downloads are filtered out. Updates delivered inside the app are not counted at all, so if anything the figure is low.
I did not know what to expect when we released it. Five hundred downloads in the first month is a good start, but the part I value more is how many people came back with useful feedback.
How it happened
Not through advertising, because there was none. A landing page, a handful of honest articles about what verified copying actually means, a few write-ups from people who cover this kind of tool, and then the thing that matters most: people trying it on real jobs and telling other people.
The download list has a few dozen people on it now who asked to hear when Stow gets better. I called that list Help shape Stow, half as a hope. It turned out to be a description. In the last three weeks alone, those people found a bug that made every NAS offload on a Mac fail, another that stopped custom text working in the folder layout on Mac, a third where Created dates went wrong on exFAT and NTFS drives, and a fourth where a deliberate design choice read exactly like a broken control. Every one of those is fixed, and most were fixed within a day or two of the email arriving.
They also asked for things I had not planned. Wrapping a card without a backup, for practice footage that is not being kept, came from a studio that hands cards to young filmmakers. It ships as the Black box in version 0.6.47. Presets you can export and carry to another machine came from two serious workflows in the same week, and it is on the roadmap. A history view of the day's ingests, date formats in the folder layout, a PDF handover report with clip thumbnails: all of it started as someone's email.
What changed because people asked
Three public releases went out in the month, 0.6.43, 0.6.45 and 0.6.47, with test builds in between. Between them Stow gained custom folder layouts, a Clips & Photos mode that files footage flat while keeping everything verified, the ability to name any card or drive it meets, phone alerts that say which machine and which cards, a proper light theme, and the fixes above. The changelog credits people anonymously, by convention, but they know who they are.
The roadmap is public now too. Anyone can see what is being built, what has been asked for and what has shipped, and where their own request sits. Most of that page started as someone's email as well.
What happens next
The aim has not moved: to make Stow as dependable and useful as we can, and keep it free for anyone who needs it. Five hundred downloads is a good start on that, not a finish. If Stow has earned a place in your workflow, the three things that help most are simple. Tell one colleague who still copies cards by hand. Rate it from the Settings page inside the app. And if something gets in your way, write to me. The evidence of this month is that it gets fixed.