Merry Christmas HN!

Tinykit is a self-hosted, self-contained alternative to Lovable/Replit/v0 designed for building small personal utility and CRUD apps (basically a "tiny app studio”). It includes realtime/auth/files (via PocketBase), an embedded dev environment, content and design fields, automated backups, and an AI agent that can work across all of them. You can connect multiple domain names (or better, a wildcard subdomain) to build and deploy 100+ apps on the same server, each hosted at its own domain name. The builder/studio runs on the same Pocketbase instance, so you can iterate on any live app by just navigating to /tinykit on its domain (i.e. kanban.jane-doe.xyz/tinykit or links.jane-doe.xyz/tinykit, same server).

I built tinykit because I wanted an easy way to spin up + deploy small apps, but on a self-contained server I controlled. I’ve relied on a bunch of different services and apps for everything from todos to notes to calendars to professional tools like a CRM and invoice generator. SaaS has its place, but usually my initial use case is simple enough I just want something easy to get started with that doesn't add the mental overhead of another account to manage or the possibility of the company losing it, selling it, or just shutting down. And with how good LLMs have gotten at one-shotting common apps the main thing standing in the way of building my own has been the mental effort of pulling everything together + deploying/managing; this drops that down to near-zero.

Tinykit is pretty simple under the hood. It runs a node process alongside a PocketBase instance which routes requests to apps based on which domain name they're being accessed from. Apps are written in a single Svelte file (for DX + better agent performance) and compiled to a static HTML file (they're all SPAs w/ a pre-rendered shell). It's a super low-maintenance setup, so even a $2/month VPS can run the whole thing. And of course, it's BYO API key.

I’ve spent the last 6 years of my life obsessed with all-in-one architectures and building approachable tools for developers that create a smaller, more human web, and what I learned over that time influenced decisions I’ve made on Tinykit. I wanted to build something that leveraged LLMs, but while enabling craft more than just an “AI does everything“ app (actually you can technically use Tinykit without AI). That way the agent can do the heavy lifting, and humans can tweak, craft, and polish. And despite all the negative AI stuff out there, it's pretty exciting being able to use it to de-SaaS my life and replace all the ad-riddled small tools I'd resigned myself to with personal, private versions. If this excites you too I'd love to hear from you in the Discord (link in repo) or via email (address in bio).

Merry Christmas again, and happy new year! - Matt

btw here’s a festive demo if you wanna get the full rundown: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=usvSmtQCJRs mirror: https://player.mediadelivery.net/embed/555834/7c3e8dd9-0221-...