Gruve is a lobby for the stuff you vibecode — apps and games that run on your own machine, where your friends can see what's alive and drop in. No cloud, no deploys, no store.
free · your hardware · your people
The lobby
Every app you or your friends share is a tile. Quiet apps stay dull, popular apps jiggle and glow. When friends are inside, the tile blooms, avatars stack up, and the busiest ones pulse. Your whole crew's evening, at a glance — one click to join it.
Two doors
An app doesn't have to be built for multiplayer to be social on Gruve. Click a friend's app and choose how you go in.
Jump into a shared session. Live cursors, a shared whiteboard, and an avatar bar are composited right on top of any app — no app changes needed. Apps built with the Gruve SDK sync real state too, Figma-style.
Open your own private session against the host's backend — dedicated-server style. Same app, just you and the host's machine doing the work.
The mesh
Each friend group is its own private network with one owner — like a server you actually own, except there's nothing in the middle. Both your data and the coordination that links you run peer-to-peer; the only optional helper is a cosmetic link-shortener, and you can switch it off entirely.
Apps live where they were made: your laptop, your desktop, a friend's homelab — macOS, Linux, and Windows can all host. Hosting on hardware you already own costs nothing.
Friends connect over direct, encrypted links, with hole-punching that just works — no router setup, no VPN to install. Your machine's cryptographic node ID is your identity; there's no account to make.
No platform hosting your stuff, no sunsetting. If Gruve vanished tomorrow, your apps would still be on your disk, still running.
The friendernet
Underneath the lobby, Gruve is a small internet that belongs to your friend group. Your machines reach each other by name, not by address — share a port and a friend uses it like it's their own; lend a GPU, a folder, a running service, and the mesh just routes to whoever has it. No cloud in the middle, no accounts, no platform renting your own stuff back to you.
The big internet centralized because it had to broker trust between strangers — that's what all the accounts and middlemen are for. A friendernet starts from the opposite place: these are already your people. So it gets to skip every bit of that, and stay yours.
Apps, capabilities, whole services — announced by name, reached over the mesh, answered by whoever's hosting. Your group's machines start to feel like one machine.
A friendernet doesn't scale to millions, and that's the point — the moment it did, it'd need the middlemen back. It's built for your people, not the public. That isn't a limit. It's the whole idea.
A note on privacy
Gruve does not and by design cannot know what you do with the app, for the simple reason that I don't want to pay for server bills.
It is peer2peer in the strongest sense. I added central server for the one single task that couldn't be p2p, which is a hashmap lookup of the short invite code to the long form. And once that expires from the server, that information is gone unless you request a new one- and you don't even need to use that feature, its just a convenience if you want to.
Gruve forms an encrypted network between you and your pals. There is no server downtime unless you trip over your power cable.
More than apps
Once your machines are linked, they can do more than trade apps.
Every net comes with end-to-end encrypted chat — talk to the people you're building with, right where you build, no third party in the loop.
Share a file or a whole folder by reference — your friend pulls it straight from your machine over the mesh. Nothing gets copied to a server first.
Got something running on localhost? Share the port and a friend reaches it as if it were on their own machine — the thing you're sharing doesn't even need to know Gruve exists.
Host what you want
A game server for six friends. A world you and your kid built. A mod that needs a backend, a voice bridge, a little web thing you threw together at 2am. If it runs on your computer, it runs on Gruve — and it reaches your people directly, over the mesh, with no platform in the middle deciding whether you're allowed.
Self-hosting keeps quietly getting reframed as a problem to be solved — something you should rent instead, or aren't really permitted to do. Running a server for your friends is one of the most normal things in the world, and it needs no one's permission. Gruve just makes it a click: the server's on your hardware, your friends connect by name, and it stays up as long as your machine does.
Minecraft, a game you wrote, anything that opens a port — host it for your crew with no hosting bill, no control panel, and no company that can pull the plug. Share the port and they're in.
No account to suspend, no central server to go down or change the terms on you. The net is just your machines talking to each other. Freedom you don't have to ask for is the only kind that lasts.
For builders
Does your app use TS or JS as a front end? Great, congratulations it is gruve compatible. gruve-kit is the open-source SDK and the contract that comes with it. Throw it at your agent and say "make this work on Gruve," and it wires up shared sessions, cross-machine backends, and presence in one pass. Announcing your app is a single POST; shared state is a single function. No netcode, no servers, no deploy step.
What it costs
Gruve is free to use, because your hardware does the hosting. I'm going to offer cheap dedicated servers in the future, but what is here already is always free.
On the roadmap ahead
Save any Gruve app straight to your home screen as a real standalone app — Apple's own install path, no review queue. Your friend's dice roller, sitting next to Messages.
Rent a node that keeps an app alive while your laptop sleeps — same lobby, same mesh, just a machine that never turns off. For when something you made deserves to stay up.