Google just published a Publisher Success Story about Sangiorgi SRL — the company I founded and still run from Sicily while working full-time at Red Hat. It’s a strange and wonderful thing to see your own origin story written up by the platform that made it possible. Here’s the longer version, in my own words.
It started as a way to learn
While I was studying computer engineering in Catania, I built WiFi WPS WPA Tester as a side project. I wanted to understand how WPS — the “press a button to connect” feature on home routers — actually worked, and how badly it could fail. The app let people check whether their own Wi-Fi network was exposed to the well-known WPS vulnerabilities of the time.
I didn’t spend a cent on marketing. I didn’t have a cent to spend. The app grew because the problem was real: people would run it, discover their network was wide open, and tell their friends. One of the most common messages I got, in every language, was some version of “I found out my neighbor was using my Wi-Fi!”
That word-of-mouth carried it to over 165 million downloads, with the strongest adoption across Asia-Pacific, Europe, and the United States.
Free, but it still has to eat
Early on I made a decision I’ve never regretted: the app would stay free. People shouldn’t have to pay to check whether their own network is secure. But “free” and “sustainable” are not the same thing, and servers, time, and a growing app don’t fund themselves.
A few months after launch I integrated Google AdMob. My philosophy was simple and hasn’t changed:
I wanted people to use it for free, yet sustain my business too.
What surprised me was how much of the hard part AdMob just handled. Mediation meant I wasn’t leaving revenue on the table chasing one network. When GDPR landed, the consent-management tooling made compliance across Europe something I could actually get right as a small team, instead of a legal trap. That revenue is what let me bring on designers and, eventually, a computer-science PhD as the work got more serious.
What it became
Sangiorgi SRL is no longer one app. It’s a small portfolio of free, ad-supported tools:
- WiFi WPS WPA Tester — the flagship, 165M+ downloads.
- Ruppu — pin notes, links, and checklists straight to your notification shade. The name comes from the Sicilian word for “knot.”
- WPA Calculator — recover the default password on common routers.
- COAT — an EU-grant-backed app that uses AI to read privacy policies for you and hand back a plain-language summary and a privacy score.
Together the apps have passed 170M+ downloads across 190+ countries, which makes Sangiorgi SRL one of Italy’s top app publishers by downloads on Google Play.
Two time zones, one alarm clock
I won’t pretend the logistics are glamorous. I run the company from the U.S. while it operates out of Militello in Val di Catania, and my day job is GPU performance engineering at Red Hat. Coordinating with the team often means a 5 AM alarm and a coffee before the rest of my day starts.
These days AI is genuinely part of how we ship — I lean on tools like Gemini for code review and for prototyping features faster than a small team otherwise could. The leverage a few people can get now is wildly different from when I started.
The only advice I actually believe
People sometimes ask how to “do what I did,” and I think the honest answer is anticlimactic. I didn’t have a business plan. I had a problem I wanted to understand and an app I wanted to exist. So my advice is just this:
Think about something useful. Then start. You’ll figure things out as you go.
Thank you to Google for telling the story — and to the 165 million people who, somewhere along the way, decided to check their Wi-Fi.