The original concept for ONCE sought to sell self-hostable web apps for a one-time fee. That didn't work. Sure, we recouped the investment on Campfire, our chat app, but that was it. You gotta listen when the market tells you what it wants! And it didn't seem to want to pay for self-hosted web apps in a one-off way.
So we set Campfire, Writebook, and now Fizzy free by releasing them all as open source with a permissive license. That worked! Tons of people have been running these apps on their own servers, contributing code back, and learning how we build real production applications at 37signals.
Now we're doubling down on the gift and adding an integrated way to run all these apps, and your own vibe-coded adventures too, on a brand-new application server we're also calling ONCE.
If you twist my arm, I can make that spell "Open Network Container Executor", but we don't even have to go there. Once is just a cool word, we already own the domain, and it's running all the original applications released under that banner as free and open-source installations. That's good enough!
The pitch here is that installing a whole suite of applications on your own server should be dead easy. The original ONCE model wanted a dedicated box or VM per app, which was just cumbersome and costly to maintain. Now you can use a single machine — even your laptop! — to run everything all at once.
ONCE gives you a beautiful terminal interface to track application metrics, like RAM + CPU usage, as well as basic visitor + request/second counts. It also gives you zero-downtime upgrades and scheduled backups. It's meant to be able to run all the infrastructure apps you'd need, like our full suite and all the ones your AI agents will soon be building for you.