Bits

Platforms control your audience. Payment processors control your revenue. Bits gives you both back.

What you get:

• Subscriptions, one-time purchases, digital downloads
• Video hosting and delivery
• Your data, your domain, your rules
• Permissive content policies for persecuted creators

Why it works:

• Self-host on a $5/month VPS or use managed hosting
• Single binary deployment - no complex setup
• Built with care to minimize resource usage and maximize reliability
• Open source - audit the code, modify what you need, contribute back

The model: Like WordPress.org - free to self-host, managed option available. You’re never locked in.

Current state: Active development. Your funding accelerates delivery.

CLI

just cli --no-color --help 2>&1

Development

just setup  # First time: generates certs, builds container images
just dev    # Starts all services via Docker Compose

All infrastructure runs in Docker containers (built with Nix). The just dev command starts PostgreSQL, Datomic transactor, Jaeger, Traefik, the Clojure nREPL, and Tailwind CSS watcher.

HTTPS and *.localhost URLs

Subdomains of localhost automatically resolve to 127.0.0.1 per RFC 6761 — no custom DNS resolver needed. Traefik terminates TLS with mkcert certificates.

Test

The marketing site and “catch-all” homepage where we have no realm aren’t a priority so will return non-200 status codes.

urls=(
  # These will work, provided you've applied the seeds in `bits.dev.realm`.
  https://bits.page.localhost
  https://charlie.bits.page.localhost
  https://jcf.bits.page.localhost
)

for url in $urls; do
  http_code="$(curl --silent --output /dev/null --write-out "%{http_code}" "$url")"
  if [ "$http_code" -eq 200 ]; then
    echo "✅ $url"
  else
    echo "❌ $url ($http_code)"
  fi
done

And with a non-existent tenant, we expect a 404 response:

url="https://foo.bits.page.localhost"
http_code="$(curl --silent --output /dev/null --write-out "%{http_code}" "$url")"

if [ "$http_code" -eq 404 ]; then
  echo "✅ $url"
else
  echo "❌ $url ($http_code)"
fi

Decision records

• Get the message out
• Python-style environment variables
• Mission over SaaS startup playbook
• CI can wait
• Clojure over Rust
• Vanilla JS over ClojureScript for bits.js
• Crypto-Shredding for GDPR Compliance
• Datahike vs Datomic for distributed coordination
• Body-style indentation for UI component functions

Dev tasks

SLOC

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 Language              Files        Lines         Code     Comments       Blanks
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
 Astro                    10          165          139            0           26
 Clojure                  66         6751         5330          505          916
 CSS                       2           84           69            4           11
 Dockerfile                1           82           58            7           17
 Edn                       2          136          121            1           14
 HCL                      12          386          320           13           53
 JavaScript                5          305          250           20           35
 JSON                      4           59           59            0            0
 Just                      1          292          181           61           50
 MDX                       1           56            0           39           17
 Nix                      11         1131          861          122          148
 Org                      15         2335         2039            5          291
 SQL                       4           43           37            0            6
 SVG                       2           12           12            0            0
 TOML                      1           43           38            0            5
 TypeScript                3           36           30            1            5
 XML                       1           18           14            1            3
 YAML                      3         5073         3988            0         1085
─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
 HTML                      1           76           72            0            4
 |- CSS                    1          171          151            0           20
 (Total)                              247          223            0           24
─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
 Markdown                  1          404            0          266          138
 |- Clojure                1          238          152           50           36
 |- Org                    1           19           12            0            7
 |- Rust                   1           68           49           10            9
 |- YAML                   1            1            1            0            0
 (Total)                              730          214          326          190
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 Total                   146        17984        13983         1105         2896
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83a623b @ 2026/02/26 23:46

TODOs

src/bits/app.clj:;; TODO Use Malli (or clojure.spec) to coerce and parse/validate configuration.
src/bits/asset.clj:;; TODO Make content-type explicit or more intelligent.
src/bits/brotli.clj:                          ;; TODO: Default buffer size for brotli library, needs to be tuned.
src/bits/middleware.clj:            ;; TODO Rename :sid to :session/id
src/bits/module/creator.clj:        ;; TODO: Real data from database
src/bits/module/creator.clj:     ;; TODO Extract platform/realm domain
src/bits/morph.clj:;; FIXME Relocate `morphable`.
src/bits/schema.clj:   ;; FIXME Avoid stringly typed entities - use `:db/ident`.
src/bits/ui.clj:  ;; TODO: I18n - error presentation
test/bits/session_test.clj:                                           ;; FIXME Remove `:sid` from `data`.