Naming a Developer Tool: Why Lowercase Won

Naming a product is one of those decisions that feels trivial until you realize it touches everything: your domain, your npm package, your import statements, your marketing site, your legal filings, your social media handles, and every conversation anyone ever has about your product.

We spent more time on this than we’d like to admit. Here’s where we landed and why.

The Platform Name: smplkit

All lowercase. No camelCase. No PascalCase. No hyphens. Just smplkit.

This wasn’t accidental. Look at the developer tooling landscape: terraform, kubernetes (and kubectl), docker, redis, nginx, sqlite, fastapi. Lowercase is the default register for tools that developers type in terminals, import in code, and reference in documentation.

Capitalized names like SmplKit or SMPLKIT would work in a marketing headline but feel wrong in a pip install command or an import statement. We wanted a name that looks natural in every context — from a conference talk slide to a docker-compose.yml file.

The missing vowels are intentional too. “Simple Kit” as a name is descriptive but forgettable. Dropping the vowels makes it distinctive and compact — it reads as a word rather than a phrase. It’s the same linguistic trick that made Flickr, Tumblr, and Kubernetes memorable. You process it as a shape, not a sentence.

Product Names: The Smpl Prefix

Individual products use the Smpl prefix with a capitalized product name: Smpl Config, Smpl Flags, Smpl Jobs, Smpl Logging.

This creates a recognizable product family. When you see “Smpl” followed by a noun, you know it’s a smplkit product. It’s a pattern that scales to any number of products without namespace collisions.

Each product name is a single word — a short, common noun that describes what the product does. Config, not Configuration Manager. Flags, not Feature Flag Service. This convention keeps names scannable and prevents the enterprise-naming disease where products end up with four-word names that nobody uses.

Inside the developer console, we drop the “Smpl” prefix entirely. When you’re already inside smplkit, the brand context is established — the sidebar just says Config, Flags, Logging. The full “Smpl Config” name appears in external contexts: documentation, marketing materials, blog posts, and anywhere the product is referenced outside the smplkit ecosystem.

What We Rejected

SmplKit (PascalCase) — introduces visual complexity. The lowercase version is more distinctive and better suited to developer contexts.

Independent product names — we briefly considered giving each product its own unrelated name. This works for large companies (AWS has DynamoDB, Lambda, CloudFront — all independent names) but fails for a startup. When nobody knows who you are yet, product family naming is free brand reinforcement. Every mention of “Smpl Config” is also a mention of “Smpl.”

Acronyms or abstract names — names like “Vex” or “Prion” or “Axiom” are trendy but force you to explain what the product does every time you mention it. “Smpl Config” is self-documenting. A developer who has never heard of smplkit can guess what Smpl Config does from the name alone.

The Trademark Question

We use the ™ symbol in marketing contexts. This is a common-law trademark assertion — you can use ™ without registration to signal that you’re treating the name as a brand. It’s the ® symbol that requires formal registration.

For an early-stage product, ™ is sufficient. If the product grows to the point where trademark disputes become a realistic concern, formal registration with the USPTO is straightforward and relatively inexpensive.

Naming Principles for Developer Tools

If you’re naming your own developer tool, here’s what we’d pass along:

Optimize for the terminal, not the boardroom. Your name will appear in import statements, CLI commands, and config files orders of magnitude more often than it appears in a PowerPoint. Lowercase, no spaces, no special characters.

Be self-documenting when possible. Every minute a developer spends figuring out what your product does from its name is a minute they’re not evaluating it.

Keep product names to one word. If you can’t describe it in one noun, your product scope might be too broad.

Consistency over creativity for product families. A naming pattern that works for three products will work for thirty.

The Name You’ll Live With

Naming decisions feel reversible and aren’t. Your name ends up in package registries, domain records, legal filings, social media handles, customer configurations, blog posts, conference slides, support tickets, and Stack Overflow answers. Renaming a product after it has users is technically possible and practically agonizing.

Spend the time upfront. Write the name in every context it’ll appear — a pip install command, an import statement, a marketing headline, a Slack message, a support email. If it looks wrong in any of those contexts, keep iterating.

We’re happy with smplkit. It works everywhere.

smplkit provides simple application infrastructure for SaaS teams. Learn more in the docs.