Descale
Minimalist products for minimalist people on minimalist hardware.
Software has been creeping. More tabs, more notifications, more accounts, more dashboards, more cloud, more bills. The tools meant to help us think now demand to be managed.
Descale is a small suite of tools that does less, on purpose.
- Minimalist products
- Each app does one thing. A to-do list. A notebook. A chat. Then it stops. No AI sidebars. No upsells. No tracking. The features you don’t see were left out deliberately.
- Minimalist people
- For the people who notice when software gets in the way, and want fewer apps doing more for them. Quietly. If you’ve ever uninstalled something to feel lighter, this is for you.
- Minimalist hardware
- Each app is a single Go binary and a SQLite file. It runs on a Raspberry Pi in your closet, a cheap VPS, or our hosted plan if you’d rather not think about it. Open source under the MIT license. Take it home whenever you like.
The suite
- Define
- A to-do list that respects your attention.
- Denote
- A notebook that loads instantly.
- Declaim
- Team chat without the noise.
More coming. Less is the point.
Values
- Privacy by default
- No tracking, no analytics, no third-party scripts. Your data is yours.
- Open source
- MIT licensed. Read the code, self-host, fork, or take your data home.
- Calm software
- No notifications begging for attention. No dark patterns. No growth hacking.
- Built to last
- Simple stacks age better. We choose boring technology that still works in ten years.
Tech decisions
- Go and SQLite
- Each app is a single binary and a database file. Easy to back up, easy to move.
- Self-hostable by design
- Runs on a Raspberry Pi, a cheap VPS, or our hosted plan. You choose.
- Few dependencies
- We add a dependency only when the standard library is not enough. We use HTMX by default, and Alpine.js only when a page truly needs reactivity.