What would you make if your app had no cloud bill, ever?

My friend Matt and I spent the last year building Seamside — a creative workspace where every byte lives on the devices of the people using it. No company servers. No accounts. No storage tier. When you and I collaborate, my machine talks to yours, directly.

We're launching it on PH soon, but I'd rather talk about the thing itself than the launch.

The bet: the internet got worse because the incentives got worse. Once a company has to store your stuff, it has to charge you or mine you, and mining scaled better. Everything downstream — the feeds, the ads, the enshittification — follows from that one architectural decision. So we removed it and rebuilt on top of what's left: peer-to-peer QUIC, CRDTs, and a keypair that never leaves your machine.

What you actually do with it: you open a space (a shared live canvas), and you fill it with frames — sandboxed micro-apps. Notes, a whiteboard, a chat box, a synth, a scoreboard for your kid's soccer team. Hit Cmd+K, describe what you want, and build one in a few minutes. Mark it CC0 and anyone in the space can copy it to their own machine and crack it open. Shared shop plans, but for software.

So — the actual question:

If your software had no cloud bill and no server to answer to, what would you build that you can't justify building today? The weird tiny tool for eleven people. The thing that would never survive a product review. The one that only makes sense for your family, your band, your lab.

That's the whole category we think is missing, and I'm curious whether you feel the gap too.

— Adam, one of two devs at Small Craft
https://seamside.com