What's new — July 20262026-07-03We rebuilt how you create an account and sign in — with a few different ways to do it, and email verification before an account even exists. Plus single sign-on across the ecosystem, and this blog and newsletter.
One person, with a little help from AI2026-07-02The Hub is built by one developer, with code assistance from an AI. That's a tool the builder uses — it does not mean AI is baked into your experience. In the product, you are never forced into AI.
Why we built The Hub Ecosystems2026-07-01It started as one thing — a system I built for myself to manage a chaotic life. It's still early, and right now I'm the only person using it. This is where it came from, and where it's headed.
How The Hub Ecosystems is built2026-06-28A plain-English look at the technology behind The Hub — built in Rust, private by design, and able to run on your own hardware or as a managed service.
What's new — July 2026By The Hub Ecosystems — 2026-07-03Here's what we've been shipping recently. A new front door for accounts The biggest piece: we rebuilt how you create an account and sign in to The Hub. The goal was to make it flexible and genuinely secure, without forcing everyone down the same path. A few of the ways you'll be able to get in: Email and password — with a twist: we verify your email before the account is created, so there's no such thing as a half-made, unverified account sitting around. Throwaway and disposable email addresses are turned away at the door. No email? No problem. You can create an account with just a username and password, secured by a recovery phrase — a set of words that acts as your personal backup key. Nothing to leak, no inbox required. Fast sign-in on a device you trust — once you've used a device before, getting back in can be as quick as your username and a PIN. A new device gets an extra check — signing in somewhere we haven't seen before asks for one more step, so a stolen password alone isn't enough. This is rolling out carefully rather than thrown open all at once — but the foundation is built, and it's a big step toward The Hub being something anyone can pick up. One sign-in across the ecosystem The Hub is a set of apps, and it never made sense to sign in to each of them separately. Now you don't have to: one account signs you in across the ecosystem. Sign in once, and the apps recognise you. This blog and newsletter You're looking at one of them. We wanted a straightforward place to share what we're building and why — so we made this blog, split into Stories (the thinking behind The Hub) and Updates (what's new, like this one). The newsletter is the other half. Subscribe and we'll email you when we ship something worth telling you about — nothing else. You confirm your email first, and every message has a one-click unsubscribe. No noise, no games. Coming up There's a lot in flight. We'll keep posting here as it lands. If you'd rather it came to your inbox, subscribe below.
One person, with a little help from AIBy The Developer — 2026-07-02Let me be upfront about how The Hub gets made: it's built by one person — me — with code assistance from an Artificial Intelligence. That's worth saying plainly, because it's becoming normal to hide it. AI helps me write and review code faster than one person otherwise could, and it lets a solo developer take on something this broad. But the direction, the decisions, and the judgment about what The Hub should be are mine. The AI is a very capable tool; it isn't the one deciding what gets built or why. A tool for the builder is not a feature in your Hub Here's the important distinction, and it's one I take seriously. Me using AI to build The Hub is completely separate from AI being in the product you use. Those are two different things, and I refuse to let the first quietly become the second. In The Hub, you are never forced into AI. Ever. Anything AI-powered is optional and off by default. You turn it on if you want it, and not otherwise. No essential function depends on it. The things that have to work — your messages, your calendar, your email — work with no AI in the loop at all. Where AI features do exist, they're designed to be a bolt-on you control, not a condition of using your Hub. Your content isn't quietly handed to an AI to use. Opting in is a decision you make, not a default you have to discover and switch off. Why I'm telling you Because trust is the whole point. If I'm going to ask you to keep your life in one place, you deserve to know how that place is built — and to know that "the developer uses AI" never turns into "your private data feeds an AI you didn't ask for." One person can build a lot with the right tools. Making sure those tools serve you, and only when you want them, is the job.
Why we built The Hub EcosystemsBy The Developer — 2026-07-01I didn't set out to build a product. I built The Hub for myself. My life was chaotic, and the tools I was supposed to use to manage it were scattered across a dozen apps, each with its own login, its own subscription, and its own quiet claim on my data. None of them talked to each other. So I built one system that did — a single place I actually controlled. For the first twelve weeks it had no domain and no landing page. It wasn't for anyone but me. To be clear about where things stand today: it's still in active development, and I'm currently the only person using it. This isn't a finished product you can sign up for yet. Why it's growing beyond me As I built, I started telling the people around me what I was working on. They were interested — some of them said they'd want to use it too. And I realised I needed parts of it to support my own people, which is exactly why something like Hub People exists. That interest, and that need, is why I'm beefing it up. What began as a private system is turning into something that could work for other people — carefully, and on my own terms. There's something I genuinely appreciate in that: building a thing for yourself, first and foremost, and finding that others want to lean on it in their own lives too. Building for the worker, not off them Once the idea of a wider Hub started to feel real, I began to think bigger. Why not build the other everyday apps people depend on — the ride-share, the food-delivery — but built around the worker instead of around how much can be squeezed out of them? I hate ads. I hate apps that phone home. And I didn't want to build something that depended on other companies' services — services that can change their minds, cost a fortune, or simply disappear and take your work with them. I wanted one system that was fully, genuinely mine, top to bottom. The free-for-life idea Here's a promise I care about, the one you'll see on the landing page: where I reasonably can, the essentials should be free for life for people who need them. I understand struggle. If someone's doing it tough and they meet the criteria, the last thing I want is for the tools they rely on to add to the weight. Keeping the basics genuinely accessible for those people matters to me more than squeezing them. How it stays honest That only works if the money comes from somewhere fair. So here's the model, plainly: I don't make money by selling your data, and I don't make money by burying you in ads. When there's money to be made, it comes from people who choose to pay for more — more capacity, more reach — not from the people who just need the basics to work. That's the whole idea. A system that answers to you, built by someone who needed it to answer to them first — and still the only one using it, for now.
How The Hub Ecosystems is builtBy The Hub Ecosystems — 2026-06-28We get asked how The Hub actually works. Here's an honest, non-technical-where-possible look at what's under the hood — and, just as importantly, why. (It's early days: The Hub is in active development, so some of this describes how it's designed to work as it opens up to more people.) Run it where you want This is the part that matters most, so let's be clear about it. You'll be able to run your Hub on your own hardware — a Raspberry Pi, an old computer, a laptop, whatever you've got — as a fully self-managed, self-hosted system. In that case your data lives on your device, and nobody else is in the loop. Or, if you'd rather not run anything yourself, you'll be able to have your Hub run as a managed service on our infrastructure. Today that's a VPS; as things grow it'll move into proper data-centre hosting. Either way, a Hub is designed to be locked to the person it belongs to — even when we host it, we're deliberately kept out of your content, to the point that we'd barely see so much as your email address. Self-hosted or managed, it's your Hub. That's the whole point. Built in Rust The core of The Hub is written in Rust — a modern language known for two things that matter a lot when you're handling people's private data: safety and speed. Whole categories of the bugs that cause crashes and security holes in other software simply can't happen in well-written Rust; the language refuses to compile them. That's a solid foundation to build trust on. And it's fast, so a Hub stays responsive without needing a wall of expensive servers behind it. A lightweight, durable data store We use SQLite to store data — one of the most widely deployed and thoroughly tested pieces of software in the world, the same engine that runs inside billions of phones. It's simple, rock-solid, and keeps your data in a form that's easy to back up and reason about. Native apps where they count For mobile we build proper native apps rather than wrapping a website in an icon. Native apps are faster, kinder to your battery, and can do things a webpage can't — background updates, notifications, real integration with the phone. Where a browser is the right tool we use the browser; where a native app is better, we build the native app. Privacy is an architecture decision, not a checkbox The promises we make about your privacy — set out plainly in our Privacy Policy — aren't marketing. They're baked into how the system is put together: There are no third-party ad or tracking scripts in the core apps. Nothing phones home to an ad network. Your data is designed to stay with you — on your device if you self-host, and locked to you if we host it. We don't intend to make money from your data or your attention. (And longer term, because you own your Hub, we may let you run your own ads inside your own Hub if you ever want to — with 100% of that money going to you, and only if you choose it.) Built to be understood None of this is meant to be a black box. We'd rather explain how things work than ask you to just trust us — which is exactly why this post exists. Naturally, some details we keep private — the specifics of how accounts are secured, for example, aren't spelled out here. Good security doesn't depend on secrecy, but there's no reason to hand out a map either. What we can share, we will. Want to follow along as it grows? Subscribe below.