Websites as a commons
OpenSpace is an open-source website builder with the polish of Squarespace and none of the lock-in. It's built in the open, and anyone can run their own copy.
Builders charge rent on commodities
Hosting, a CDN, an editor and AI help used to justify a monthly bill. Today they're free or open source. What was missing was the integration and the design quality.
A small nonprofit with a newsletter and a donate button can easily pay hundreds a year, indefinitely, for what is mostly static hosting and a form. Stop paying and the site disappears, along with the design work and the audience list.
OpenSpace takes the other path. Every site is a normal project in its owner's GitHub account, built with Astro and served free. The editor renders the same components as the published site, so what you see is what visitors get, and the shared Hub only does what static sites can't: forms, newsletters, analytics, members and checkout.
The result is a website builder that costs the project almost nothing per site, which is what makes free a property of the design rather than a promotion.
What we hold to
Seven principles shape every decision; these three come up most.
Licenses, in plain words
Contributions of code, templates and documentation are welcome.
Templates, blocks and the site starter
MIT. Sites must be freely forkable, so everything a published site depends on is under the most permissive license.
The Studio editor and the Hub
AGPL-3.0. If someone runs a modified copy for others, their improvements come back to the commons.
Documentation and template designs
CC BY 4.0. Remix them freely with attribution.
Can I run my own Hub?
Yes. It's one Cloudflare Workers project with a Deploy to Cloudflare button, and any site can point at it.
Build with us
Make a site, design a template, or help steward the commons.