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 gray and recede. 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.
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.
For builders
A Gruve app is just a web app that follows a small contract. gruve-kit is the open-source SDK and the contract that comes with it — drop it into your AI assistant, 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. That's the whole business model — the free thing stays 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.