Five years on, Sphere’s new site makes the case against oil in your 401(k)
Buena built Sphere’s first website in 2021. On June 16, 2026 the newest one went live: sharper, calmer and built to move retirement money out of fossil fuels.
For ten years Buena made things that good causes put out into the world: campaigns, brands, websites, films. In 2026 the studio started making something it keeps: software. Six apps now carry the Buena name, from a project manager whose beta filled up to the system that runs this very website.
“In the past 12 months, we’ve really started to increase our in house development and have begun to build apps for good causes as well,” Doug Burnett, Buena’s founder, wrote in September. That is the short version. Here is the longer one.
Buena’s app year, through September
- 6apps with the Buena nameGitterdone, Corazón, Plata, Ojo, Yarn and Fuego.
- 41new code repositoriesRepositories created on Buena’s GitHub between April 6 and September 30, 2026, for its own apps and for client work.
- 1,500+commits to the five biggest appsA commit is one saved change to an app’s code. Counted across Gitterdone, Corazón, Fuego, Plata and Ojo.
Why a campaign studio builds software
Campaigns are loud and then they end. The causes Buena works with keep running every day after the headlines move on. They need to organize their work, keep their books, look after their websites and hold on to their communities.
At its January 2026 retreat the team set three themes for the year: build systems that actually scale, create predictable and stable revenue, and raise the bar on creative excellence. One idea ran through all three. Buena would grow through products, not just headcount. By February the plan had a shape. There would be apps Buena uses itself, apps nonprofits use to run themselves, and eventually apps nonprofits could offer to their own supporters.
The rule was simple: build it for ourselves first. If an app can’t run Buena, it isn’t ready for anyone else.
Gitterdone: getting it done should feel like winning
The first and biggest is Gitterdone, a project manager for the people doing the work rather than the managers reporting up. Each Monday you lock in five commitments. Finished tasks earn points, committed tasks score double, and when the team hits its goal it spins a wheel for a reward.1
It started inside Buena on April 6, 2026 and grew into six ways to see the work, a desktop app for Mac and Windows, and an MCP server so an AI assistant can create and complete tasks. On September 14 it opened a beta. The sign-ups filled, and gitterdone.org now offers a waitlist.2
It even has a film studio. To launch it, Buena made short films under a Gitterdone Productions banner, with the yellow 3D check mark as the studio’s logo.
Build it for ourselves first. If it can’t run Buena, it isn’t ready for anyone else.
Corazón, Plata and Ojo: the heart, the money and the eye
Corazón is the company brain. It holds docs, wikis and brand assets in one place, with an AI assistant answering questions only from what the team has actually written, every answer linked to its source. It is live at corazon.buena.org, with Corazón Chat, a small Mac app that puts the assistant one keystroke away.3
Plata keeps personal, business and nonprofit books in one calm workspace. Bank and card transactions arrive through Plaid, land in a review queue and roll up into reports per workspace. It is in private preview at plata.buena.org, and on September 14 Buena applied for Plaid production access, the step before opening it to nonprofits.4
Ojo watches the websites Buena ships. Twice a day it crawls each live site, compares it with the last run and reports what changed: a draft published by mistake, a link that died, copy fixed on desktop and broken on mobile. It runs 17 deterministic checks in six groups and is in production on two client sites.
Yarn and Fuego: community and the websites themselves
Yarn gives a cause its own private network: profiles, a feed of threaded posts, polls, events and notifications. Causes build their communities on platforms they don’t own. Yarn is the version they do own, with no platform in the middle taking a cut of their people.
Fuego is the website operating system: brand, design system, pages and content, AI-native from the first screen. Its newest part, Fuego Sites, is the content system Buena’s websites are edited in. One publish is one commit, and the site rebuilds itself.5
Editors click any outlined text on the page and type. An Ask Claude panel makes edits across a whole site from a prompt, and nothing goes live until someone presses Publish. Every published version is kept as a backup, so any of them can be restored, and the restore can itself be undone.
One design system
Every app is built from the Buena Design System, the same components and tokens, so the family looks and feels like one.
A team that ships
Brayan Marcano leads development. Designers and developers like Francisco Sanchez, Santiago and Bianca Oliveira build alongside him.
AI where it helps
Corazón answers from your own docs, Gitterdone drafts tasks, and Ojo uses no AI at all to decide what’s broken.
By the numbers: where the work went
Software leaves a paper trail. Every saved change is a commit, and the commit count shows where the hours went. Gitterdone took most of them. That makes sense: it is the app the whole team opens every morning.
The next steps are already on the board. Gitterdone moves from beta toward launch. Plata opens to its first nonprofits once Plaid says yes. And Fuego Sites goes to work on Buena’s own website, the first of many.
