Backed by mandō

Let it run
quietly.

Sotto resumes what you paused and sends it to the background. One command. No interruption. Just continuation.

Join the Waitlist See it work
12M+ jobs resumed
<1ms to SIGCONT
0 dropped signals
100% idempotent

We believe work shouldn't demand your attention to continue.

There's a quiet crisis in how we think about process management. Every day, millions of workflows get paused — suspended mid-thought, frozen in place because something else needed the foreground. And then they just… sit there. Stopped. Waiting. Forgotten.

Sotto exists because continuation should be effortless. We built a tool that does exactly one thing with absolute conviction: it takes what you've paused and lets it keep going, silently, in the background. No dashboards. No twelve-step onboarding. No enterprise "workflow orchestration platform." Just the quiet confidence of knowing that when you say go, things go.

We're not building a platform. We're building a philosophy. The best infrastructure is the kind that gets out of your way — and Sotto is infrastructure that's so minimal, it barely exists at all. That's a feature.

Capabilities

Everything you need.
Nothing you don't.

↻

Continuation Engine

Delivers a SIGCONT signal to any suspended process, transitioning it from stopped to running in the background. The core of everything Sotto does.

◎

Smart Defaults

Run sotto with no arguments and it automatically selects the most recently suspended job. Zero friction. Zero decision fatigue.

⟡

Job Spec Addressing

Target jobs by number (%1), by recency (%+, %-), or by name fragment (%string). Surgical precision for exactly the process you mean.

∥

Batch Resume

Pass multiple job specs in a single invocation — sotto %1 %2 %3 — and resume your entire queue in one motion. Compound your throughput.

∞

Graceful Idempotency

Already running in the background? Sotto exits cleanly with zero errors. Call it as many times as you want. It never breaks what's already working.

⊹

Background Promotion

Converts a foreground-stopped process into an asynchronous background worker — as if it had been launched with & from the start.

How It Works

Three steps. That's all.

01

Pause something

Suspend any running process with Ctrl+Z. The shell stops the job and returns you to the prompt. The process waits, frozen in place.

02

Run Sotto

Type sotto to resume the most recent job — or use a job spec like sotto %2 to target a specific one. Sotto sends SIGCONT and transitions the job to background execution.

03

Keep working

Your process is now running silently behind the scenes. Your terminal is free. Your flow is uninterrupted. That's it.

See It

The entire product,
in one terminal session.

sotto
$ sleep 300
^Z
[1]+ Stopped sleep 300
$ node server.js
^Z
[2]+ Stopped node server.js
$ sotto %1
[1]+ sleep 300 &
$ sotto %2
[2]+ node server.js &
$

Both processes resumed in the background. Terminal free. Flow intact.

Pricing

Start quiet. Scale when you're ready.

Whisper
Free
  • 1 resume per session
  • Current job only (no job specs)
  • Community support
Get Started
Most Popular
Murmur
$14/month
  • Unlimited resumes
  • Full job spec addressing (%1, %+, %-, %string)
  • Batch resume (multiple job specs)
  • Priority SIGCONT delivery
  • Email support
Join the Waitlist
Undertone
$39/seat/month
  • Everything in Murmur
  • Team-wide job visibility
  • Audit logs for every resume
  • SSO & role-based access
  • Dedicated support
Get Started
Subterranean
Custom
  • Everything in Undertone
  • 99.99% SIGCONT SLA
  • Custom integrations
  • Dedicated account manager
  • On-premise deployment

Kind Words

People who get it.

"I used to lose entire tmux sessions because I'd forget about stopped jobs. Sotto changed my relationship with background processes. It's the most high-leverage tool in my stack."
Runa Khalil Principal SRE, Lattice Systems
"We onboarded 40 engineers last quarter. Sotto's batch resume cut our dev env setup friction by half. That's not incremental — that's a paradigm shift."
Adrian Morrow VP Engineering, ScaleForge
"There's something poetic about software that does one thing perfectly. Sotto resumes my jobs. That's it. And that's everything."
Hana Luz Solo Developer & Writer

The Team

Built by people who ship.

Vivian Voss

Co-founder & CEO

"The best products are the ones you forget are running."

Nadine Tanaka

Co-founder & CTO

"SIGCONT is the most underrated primitive in computing."

Ada Okonkwo

Head of Product

"We removed every feature that wasn't continuation."

FAQ

Questions we get asked.

What happens if the job is already running?

Nothing — and that's by design. Sotto is fully idempotent. If a job is already executing in the background, Sotto recognises that and exits successfully. No errors, no side effects, no surprises.

Can I resume multiple jobs at once?

Absolutely. Pass multiple job specs — sotto %1 %2 %3 — and Sotto sends SIGCONT to each in sequence. It's the highest-leverage way to unblock your entire queue.

What if I don't specify a job?

Sotto defaults to the most recently suspended job — the one marked with + in your job table. Smart defaults mean zero friction for the 90% use case.

Does Sotto work without job control enabled?

Job control is a foundational requirement. If it's not enabled in your shell session, Sotto will exit with a clear diagnostic message. We believe in failing loudly rather than silently misbehaving.

Is my data secure?

Sotto operates entirely within your local shell execution environment. No data leaves your machine. No telemetry. No cloud. Just you and your processes.

Ready to let things run?

Join the waitlist. We'll reach out when it's your turn.

Backed by mandō

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