Scrappy – Make little apps for you and your friends

The core vision here is something I can absolutely get on board with, but the execution fundamentally seems to misunderstand why "home-cooked software" doesn't exist.

The target audience problem is immediately apparent: they're building a product for people who can write JavaScript event handlers but somehow can't 'npx create-react-app'. This demographic is approximately twenty-seven people.

More critically, they've confused the problem space, in my opinion. The barrier to personal software isn't the lack of drag-and-drop of JavaScript environments. It's that software, unlike a meal or a home-made sweater, comes with an implicit support contract that lasts forever. When I cook dinner for friends, I'm not on the hook when they're hungry again next Tuesday. When my grandma knits a home-made sweater, she's not expected to keep supporting it in case I want to add a hood.

When the attendance counter has a race condition and the venue goes over capacity, guess who's getting the angry call when the fire marshal shows up for an inspection?

The "redistributing the means of software production" rhetoric rings particularly hollow from what appears to be a proprietary SaaS in the making. You don't democratize software by creating another walled garden. And their claim about "owning your data" while simultaneously offering real-time sync is either technically naive or deliberately misleading. How is the attendee counter example's counter state shared between users, if the data lives in local storage? I don't see how you can have both without server infrastructure that they control.

The actual nearest thing to their vision already exists and has millions of users: Spreadsheets. Non-technical people build complex, business-critical "applications" in spreadsheets every day. No JS required, local-first, and everyone already knows how to use it. But "we made a worse Excel" doesn't sound as revolutionary, I suppose.

The real unsolved problem isn't making it easier to create small apps - I build small tools for myself all the time. It's making them sustainable without creating permanent maintenance burdens. And that is not something you can solve with a new framework or SaaS - it's at it's core, a social issue.

> they're building a product for people who can write JavaScript event handlers but somehow can't 'npx create-react-app'

There's an enormous gap in complexity, required skill, etc between creating these Scrappy applications and building the whole app in React, and then getting it deployed, complete with real time syncing, authorization (as they've implemented with their "frames" and everything. It's at least an order of magnitude greater in effort.

> software, unlike a meal or a home-made sweater, comes with an implicit support contract that lasts forever

I don't think it always has to. It tends to be that way because so far, the lift to create a functioning cross-device multi user application has been high enough that the economics of it requires centralized teams of specialists to build an application for many hundreds of people.

If you lower the stakes really low to the point where the app is as serious as a spreadsheet, then compare it to spreadsheets. Almost everyone has dozens of really casual spreadsheets, many households have shared google sheets for particular, short-lived or casual or constantly changing use-cases. When you slap together a spreadsheet with your partner, you aren't making a promise about long term support and compatibility with the spreadsheet.

Or an other similar thing would just be paper and pen and tape, up on a whiteboard. All kinds of little "hand made" "applications" like this exist in households and in offices. Kanban boards are an example of this but there's and endless different kinds of "board-based physical apps" like chore charts and weekly meal plans. When someone writes on their fridge a list of chores and starts tallying who does what, that is not an eternal promise to maintain the piece of paper with chores and tally marks protocol/system.

The comments about being a SAAS, walled garden, and about the specific implementation here wrt where data's stored etc, this is just a prototype. A POC.