The Software You Can't Uninstall

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In 1968, a venture capital investor named Joseph McKinney bought a company that manufactured sewage pipes. He called his holding company Tyler Corporation after the acquisition — Tyler Pipe. For three decades, that is what the company did. It made iron pipes.

Then in 1998, John Marr did something nobody expected. He sold the pipes. All of them. He took what was left — a small collection of government software companies Tyler had quietly acquired — and bet the entire firm on a single idea: local government runs on software, and nobody was building it well.

Revenue that year was $50 million.

I paid my property taxes online last month. The screen was plain — a government website with a county seal and a search bar. I typed my address, clicked through, and paid. Somewhere in the bottom corner was a small line of text I had never noticed before: "Powered by Tyler Technologies." Then I checked the county court records portal. Tyler. The clerk of court's e-filing system. Tyler. The school district's finance system. Tyler.

Most people have never heard of Tyler Technologies. That is the point. It does not sell to consumers. It does not advertise on television. It sells software to governments — the courts, the tax offices, the police departments, the schools, the public works offices, and the clerks that keep the records of everything a municipality does. It is the operating system of American local government.

Marr spent the next two decades acquiring small, specialized government software firms — more than 40 since 1998. Court case management. Property tax assessment. Utility billing. School transportation. Public safety dispatch. Each product served a narrow slice of government operations. Each one locked in the moment it was installed — because the data underneath it was irreplaceable. Property records going back decades. Case files that cannot be migrated without court approval. Tax rolls that feed directly into county revenue. You do not rip out that kind of system on a whim.

Today Tyler serves all 25 of the 25 largest cities in the United States. It serves 22 of the 25 largest counties. Its software runs in all 50 states, plus Canada, the Caribbean, and Australia. Total installations exceed 45,000 across more than 15,000 locations — from the County of Los Angeles, population 9.7 million, to Loving County, Texas, population 71.

In fiscal 2025, Tyler reported $2.33 billion in revenue — up from $50 million when it entered the government market 27 years ago. Recurring revenue — subscriptions, SaaS, transactions, and maintenance — made up 87% of the total. SaaS revenue alone grew roughly 20% across every quarter of the year. Annualized recurring revenue hit $2.1 billion. The company employs roughly 7,600 people and carries a 98% client retention rate. That means in any given year, only 2 out of every 100 government clients leave. I have a hard time finding a stickier business.

Take at look at this stack of papers covered in black marker:

What you're looking at are the 750 White House files President Trump quietly "redacted" behind closed doors.

But what happened next was even more peculiar…

You see, directly after deleting federal files that had been in place since Jimmy Carter was in office…

President Donald Trump wrote a $300 million check to a controversial company located in Foothill Ranch, California.

Strangely enough, he didn't utter a single word about it to the cameras. Even more fascinating, it turns out, Trump's not acting alone…

If you follow the money trail…

Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett, Bill Gates… even an up-and-coming tech titan who the late Charlie Munger referred to as, "the new emperor of the world"… have all poured billions into the same area.

Click here for the full story, including the name of the company Trump just invested $300 million in — absolutely free.

That 98% retention rate is the number that tells the whole story. A government that installs Tyler's court management system does not switch — not because the software is perfect, but because the data trapped inside it is irreplaceable. Decades of case files. Millions of property records. Tax assessment histories that feed county budgets. Migrating that data to a new vendor takes years of planning, millions in consulting fees, and a procurement process that most city councils do not have the appetite to approve. So they renew. Year after year.

The pricing power is quiet but persistent. Tyler has been migrating its government clients from on-premises installations to cloud-based SaaS subscriptions. When a client "flips" — Tyler's term — the annual recurring revenue per client rises. In the fourth quarter of 2024, the average revenue uplift on a flip was 32%. The client pays more each year, but the system works better, updates are automatic, and the government no longer needs to maintain its own servers. In fiscal 2025, 96% of all new software contracts were signed as SaaS deals. The old model is dying. The new model charges more — and clients sign anyway.

When Lynn Moore became CEO in May 2018, he said of John Marr: "John Marr's vision and direction as CEO over the past 14 years have built Tyler into the company it is today — a company sharply focused on delivering for all of its constituents." Marr had arrived in the early 2000s and steered the transformation from a pipe manufacturer to the only publicly traded company focused solely on software for state and local government. Under Marr and then Moore, revenue grew from $50 million to $2.33 billion — a 46-fold increase in 27 years.

The flywheel is quiet and deep. Tyler enters a county with one product — say, a tax assessment system. Then the county adds court case management. Then utility billing. Then school finance. Each product shares the same data backbone. Each one makes the next product easier to adopt and harder to remove. The most-embedded client in the country is Collin County, Texas, which uses 12 Tyler products. Every product is another layer of lock-in. Every layer is another line of recurring revenue.

WHY THIS WORKS

Tyler Technologies started life as a sewage pipe company. It sold every pipe, bought 40 government software firms, and became the only public company in America focused solely on software for local government. Today, 45% of Tyler's employees previously worked in the public sector — they came from the courthouses and tax offices they now serve. The company that makes the invisible software behind your property tax bill, your traffic ticket, and your building permit was, 30 years ago, making iron pipes. The pivot worked.