The short version of everything: your apps, your machines, your people. The long version is below.
Yes. Gruve is free because your own hardware does the hosting — there's nothing for us to charge you for. Later we'll sell always-on nodes for apps you want running 24/7, and that's the entire business model. The free thing stays free.
On your machines. An app you make runs on your laptop or desktop; an app a friend shares runs on theirs. Nothing is uploaded to a platform, and if Gruve disappeared tomorrow, the files would still be on your disk.
Their apps go dark. The tile grays out in everyone's lobby until the machine wakes up. We think honesty beats magic here — that's what self-hosting means. For the apps that deserve to stay up, always-on nodes are on the roadmap.
No. Nets are invite-only with one owner, and there's no public directory, search, or discovery. A net you're not invited to is invisible to you.
Less than you'd expect — there's no server in the middle to see anything. Both your app traffic and the coordination that connects you run peer to peer over direct, encrypted connections. The only optional piece of ours is a cosmetic shortener that turns a long reference into a few friendly words, and you can switch it off completely. Nothing about a net depends on our servers staying up.
No. No port forwarding, no router settings, no VPN to install. Gruve handles the hole-punching to link your machines directly, and sets itself up when you join a net.
The sweet spot is the stuff you vibecode: web apps, toys, tools, and little games. If you made it in an afternoon with an AI assistant and want your friends in it by evening, that's exactly what Gruve is for.
Cloud deploys publish a thing to the world on someone else's machines. Gruve keeps the thing on your machine and brings your specific people to it. It's private by default, free by architecture, and built around live sessions with friends rather than URLs for strangers.
Apps run sandboxed — they don't get the run of your machine — and the only people who can put apps in front of you are people you accepted an invite from. The trust model is the same as your group chat: it's your friends.
Yes. Every net has end-to-end encrypted chat. You can send a file or a whole folder by reference, which a friend streams straight from your machine — no upload step, no copy left on a server. And you can share a local port, so something already running on your machine becomes reachable to a friend as if it were theirs.
Partly, and we'd rather be straight about it. A net is owned by one person who controls who's invited, so the first line of defense is simply your guest list. Moderation tooling beyond that is still partial and actively being built — for now, treat a net like a private room of people you actually trust.
The desktop app is macOS first, because that's where we and our friends live, with Windows and Linux desktop builds to follow. Hosting is already more flexible — a macOS, Linux, or Windows machine can all run as a host node in a net.