alt.hn

5/27/2026 at 2:36:41 PM

Show HN: Open-source Workspace (mail,docs,spreadsheet,drive) web/iOS

 https://tinycld.org/

by nathanstitt

5/27/2026 at 2:39:12 PM

Hey all, Nathan here, I'm the author.

I wrote TinyCld because Google in their infinite wisdom decided to cancel my 20 year old free Google Apps suite for "commercial usage". Which, to be fair it totaly was, and I obviously shouldn't complain about 20+ years of free usage.

But _still_, that wasn't the terms I signed up under, and nothing is more irratating than a good old fashioned rug pull. How hard could it be, right?

TinyCld is two things, a self contained workspace like the one we're all familiar with (mail/cal/contacts/drive/text/calc), as well as an easy to extend platform that brings all the batteries you'd need to write realtime web+native apps.

And yes, I used AI to write a lot of this. (really, ~200k loc by one author is a pretty good tell) Some may hate on that and thats fine, I get it. But I did look at each commit and there is a lot of bugfixing and tweaking features back and forth that went into it. If nothing else, I've got some good stories to tell here and have learned a lot.

Stack: Expo (React Native + web) on the frontend, PocketBase + Go on the backend. Standard protocols (IMAP/SMTP/CalDAV/CardDAV/WebDAV) so native clients work as well.

I'm currently using it myself with a few friends but has not been widely used beyond that.

Demo (no signup): https://tinycld.org/ and click the big Demo button.

One-line Docker install: https://tinycld.org/docs/installation Build a package in 10 min: https://tinycld.org/docs/creating-a-package iOS app: https://apps.apple.com/app/tinycld/id6762420971 Repo: https://github.com/tinycld

I'm very interested in any feedback anyone can offer. I've got a looong list of add-on packages I'm considering, suggestions welcomed!

by nathanstitt

5/27/2026 at 8:25:03 PM

[dead]

by doctorpangloss

5/27/2026 at 9:19:44 PM

I like this. However, I just gave your Sheets a simple stress test by selecting a bunch of cells, then using the fill handle to populate other cells, and afterward doing an undo (Ctrl+Z). It completely crapped out and did not do what I expected...which was to return to its original state prior to using the fill handle, with the selection still selected.

by djfobbz

5/27/2026 at 9:26:27 PM

Sorry it didn't work :( I just tried and looks like it got _so close_, it did undo the insertion of values, but the selection remained. I think that's probably debatable behavior, but isn't what Google Sheets does.

I may be mis-understanding what you experienced though, If you'd like to provide more details and/or some screenshots please file a issue https://github.com/tinycld/calc/issues

by nathanstitt

5/27/2026 at 8:03:06 PM

The spreadsheet app looks like a really nice boiler plate. I was surprised to learn about this amazing library digging through the docs: https://github.com/handsontable/hyperformula

by philips

5/27/2026 at 8:12:56 PM

Yes, Hyperformula is amazing! it's actually the primary reason TinyCld is AGPL vs MIT, doing so was totally worth it in order to be compatible with it's GPL3 license.

by nathanstitt

5/28/2026 at 6:31:53 AM

Thanks for a good word! Founder of HyperFormula here. HF will go AGPL soon, too

by warpech

5/28/2026 at 3:41:32 PM

HyperFormula was the key to unlocking the entire spreadsheet, the technical foundation of sparse rendering and multi-user interactions were easy enough with Yjs and and a few other libs, but I was completely stuck on how to support formulas beyond simple SUM and such until I found it.

by nathanstitt

5/27/2026 at 9:11:40 PM

Looks really nice. Do you plan to support this in the future? Are you planning to foster a community of developers around it, or are you thinking about hosting it as a service?

Asking for a friend, who also enjoys building projects with LLMs, but publishing and supporting them not so much.

by smokel

5/27/2026 at 9:15:40 PM

yes, I'm planning to support it indefinitely - my company (~10 users) just started using it so we're very invested in it's success.

I'd love for people to write whatever crazy packages they can think of for it so it has a rich ecosystem. It has the ability for admins to add a git or NPM reference into the packages list and install packages on the fly like wordpress supports.

As for hosting as a service, maybe someday. I also own the tinycld.com so who knows.

by nathanstitt

5/27/2026 at 5:04:28 PM

This looks really cool and more modern than Nextcloud. From the homepage, I was a little wary of the idea of hosting my own email server -- doesn't that require a ton of effort due to spam? Or can I use it with an external provider and use this as webmail?

by dangrover

5/27/2026 at 5:07:00 PM

yes, I should make this clearer: You do not actually host the email, tinycld uses a transactional host for sending and receiving. I also have a lot of scars from doing that in the past and I'm happy to pay someone else a few $$ a month for that service.

We support postmark right now (it has spam filtering), mailgun in the near future. Plus probably a pure smtp server for those who _really_ want to do it all themselves.

by nathanstitt

5/27/2026 at 8:28:21 PM

Add SES support.

by doctorpangloss

5/27/2026 at 8:32:34 PM

Interesting, I wasn't aware that SES did inbound and it looks fairly affordable as well. I'll have to do this, thanks for mentioning it

by nathanstitt

5/27/2026 at 9:18:33 PM

Other nice options would be Resend and the Cloudflare Email Service

by vixalien

5/27/2026 at 5:44:49 PM

This looks awesome, thank you. Kudos for supporting dark mode out of the box. Looking forward to seeing calendar and drive catching up to full dark mode.

by atmanactive

5/27/2026 at 5:59:38 PM

thanks! it also has the ability for user themes but they are fairly weak. really only supports setting color swatches

by nathanstitt

5/27/2026 at 9:25:30 PM

I have been considering Nextcloud for a homelab install, but dreading the deployment/maintenance story there if I ever start relying on it as a source of truth. Would definitely consider a smaller option like this.

My biggest worry is your supply chain. If you're mostly using AI, would love to see you build your own library of functions and drop as many direct and transient dependencies as possible.

Nice work!

by elevation

5/27/2026 at 9:34:27 PM

hah, so I've been fighting AI all the time as it tries to write all this on it's own vs re-using libraries. To me that's a much safer option, because the libraries all pre-date AI so I assume the authors know what they're doing.

Not to bag on Nextcloud but I do think that this is _much_ easier to understand and maintain, it's standard Go/React/Sqlite, nothing esoteric so if you did need to maintain it I'm sure anyone could pick it up. Of course I don't really know Php so that def flavors my opinions here.

I have an example of a one-shot TODO app: https://github.com/tinycld/todo just to demonstrate what's possible.

by nathanstitt

5/27/2026 at 9:47:40 PM

The claims you make about Go/React are similar to the claims made by PHP and Python and JS users. Basically: the thing I'm familiar with is easy - then imply that it would be the same level of easy for others.

This does look easier than Nextcloud however I'm not sure thats the tech-stack. Generally the new project is easier/simpler because it doesn't have so many years of scope-creep, work-arounds, half-imolemented-then-abandond features.

by edoceo

5/27/2026 at 9:57:16 PM

yep very true, everyone has their preferred stack, and greenfield is _always_ easier than maintaining years worth of past code.

I did look really closely at Nextcloud when it came time to leave Google apps. I really wanted it to work but also wanted:

* Realtime updates - Pockebase gives us this for free.

* A native app - React Native <- this one worked out but does cause pain with the web version, some things don't work _quite_ as well as a standard React ap would.

* Lightweight docs that work on mobile. Collabora is very full-featured but is also pretty slow. It remains to be seen if I've successfully here because we're only starting to use our docs "for real"

And also: I'm absolutely sure this has many bugs that I've yet to uncover. All I can say is that I am planning on using it for real-world business stuff so I'm sure we'll be uncovering and fixing them throughout the next year.

by nathanstitt

5/27/2026 at 5:49:40 PM

PocketBase is awesome and this thing looks awesome.

One question, I could not understand if a mail provider is needed or it handles on its own?

by betimsl

5/27/2026 at 5:57:26 PM

currently only supports postmark but based on the conversions here i’m thinking expanding that will probably be the next thing i implement

by nathanstitt

5/27/2026 at 6:01:47 PM

[dead]

by sedimannapoleon

5/27/2026 at 5:48:05 PM

Interesting! Will try this soon, I have very similar gripes with nextcloud et al that you mentioned. The lock in to postmark I don't love, I think I would rather have it be a SMTP+IMAP "proxy" so I can use my existing email service within the suite of apps seamlessly.

by thijsmie

5/27/2026 at 5:55:56 PM

yep i know postmark wont be everyone’s fave. i’ve abstracted all that to a single golang interface so it’d be easy to swap out. i’ll probably write a pure SMTP version as an example soon

by nathanstitt

5/27/2026 at 4:05:04 PM

Interesting. I've tried owncloud, nextcloud, and other similar "all-in-one" solutions in the past. None ever stuck with me, for various reasons I cannot remember. I just might try this out on a weekend when I have some free time.

by dvirdung

5/27/2026 at 4:31:29 PM

excellent, I've also tried all the products you mention but they all felt either too heavy or limited to me. I'd love any feedback you can offer, GitHub issues are open if you hit bugs.

by nathanstitt

5/27/2026 at 6:45:34 PM

Stared the repo for now, will give it a spin in this or next weekend I hope :)

by dvirdung

5/27/2026 at 8:04:02 PM

I have seen lately a number of new productivity suite.

How is the Microsoft Office compatibility managed by these tools? There is a popular SDK providing the compatibility? I can't imagine everyone reimplementing the full compatibility layer

by gbalduzzi

5/27/2026 at 8:11:26 PM

Good question, TinyCld does uses docx/xlsx files on the drive package as the native storage for text/calc. Drive is exported via webdav so doing so lets native clients load the files as well. Locking is used though so web & native _hopefully_ do not conflict.

Text uses https://github.com/ZeroHawkeye/wordZero to read/write the docx, parse it into a y-prosemirror and served with yjs to clients using https://github.com/skyterra/y-crdt

And Calc uses https://github.com/xuri/excelize using the same techniques but uses plain Yjs Y.Map/Y.Array using a sparsely populated table

by nathanstitt

5/27/2026 at 9:06:00 PM

Office compatibility really runs into the xkcd workflow problem[1]. For the overwhelming majority of users, any of these alternative office suites will work exactly as expected. They can save and open MS Office files, and can do all of the tasks most users need. But there will always be some user who has some hyper-specific need that decide they just can't get away from MS Office. This often comes down to some plugin, or some strange behavior of MS Office that the user has come to expect. Often, there's no technical reason these plugins couldn't be moved to some competitor, but they haven't been. Frequently, there's no reason the user needs this exact workflow, but it's what they know, and they don't want to change.

So how is MS Office compatibility manged by these tools? It depends on who you ask.

[1] https://xkcd.com/1172/

by thesuitonym

5/27/2026 at 4:56:23 PM

Looks promising! The multi-org feature is interesting, and not something I see very often with these types of solutions. Is the use-case that I host and manage it, and onboard my clients as users in their own orgs?

by FlamingMoe

5/27/2026 at 5:04:48 PM

Yes, exactly that.

Personally I have several small (tiny really) companies where employees wear a few hats in them, this setup allows me to add people to org (and email domain) A & B while not getting C.

It is _not_ setup at all for billing or anything like that though, but that would be a easy enough feature to add

by nathanstitt

5/28/2026 at 4:01:49 PM

I will try it out. Can agents interact with systems?

by NBenkovich

5/28/2026 at 4:16:12 PM

Yes, absolutely. All agents seem to know how to talk to the Pocketbase API without telling them much about it if you're wanting to directly interact with tables.

We also have https://tinycld.org/llms.txt for writing packages and periodically test it's usefulness by one-shoting a simple TODO app: https://github.com/tinycld/todo

by nathanstitt

5/28/2026 at 2:14:00 PM

Thank you for sharing. Nice landing page and very cool demo.

I was wondering what your reason is of developing it instead of just use nextcloud for your company or for mail, calendar, drive, docs and sheets? I mean at least with nextcloud you'd be up and running and have a battle tested solution.

I totally get the do it yourself approach and it's reason enough. And combining all the apps in one web interface is really solved well. Kudos. But I just wonder what your technical and maybe other reasons were.

by tom1337890

5/28/2026 at 3:38:16 PM

Yea I really did want to go Nextcloud because it is the battle tested solution as you note, but a few things held me back.

  * It's UI felt dated - which I agree is not an entirely good reason to not use it, but certain stakeholders in the org that will be using it felt it wouldn't be acceptable.
  * Collabera Office, which underpins their doc solution is kinda weird how it runs, everything renders on the server and then is displayed on the clients.  Not mobile friendly at all.
I did really like the ecosystem though and did consider just writing the plugins I needed for it. But then that went down a rabbit hole in itself with Php which I don't have fond memories of.

Ultimately it was a case of "be the change you want to see in the world". This is my opinionated answer to what an online suite of apps should work like for better or worse. I'm in a good spot where I have a small group of users who I'm close to that can stress test it out and yell at me when stuff breaks.

by nathanstitt

5/27/2026 at 8:51:46 PM

nice, I was just deciding what to use. I tried nextcloud, but I'm running a php system on my machines.

by barddoo

5/29/2026 at 10:48:59 PM

it looks beautiful

by ThreatPortSec

5/28/2026 at 10:37:21 AM

[dead]

by swaminarayan

5/28/2026 at 7:00:52 AM

[flagged]

by candizdar

5/31/2026 at 8:15:12 AM

[dead]

by michaelmjh