Is it for you?
Enough to decide before you install anything, including the reasons to walk away.
The short version
Your site is mostly pages and forms. It has outgrown static hosting, because it needs to know who's visiting, take a form or show data from an API. But it doesn't deserve its own application server, build pipeline and proxy config.
With Crisptastic you write a folder of pages, the host runs them per request, and the whole site ships as one signed, encrypted file. One host program serves many sites.
Good with
- Sites that are mostly pages and forms, perhaps with sign-in, payments or uploads through the supported providers
- Data that already lives behind HTTPS APIs
- A small store of a site's own, on a single host
- Lots of small sites that would rather share one server
- People comfortable operating one Linux service and a reverse proxy
Not good with
- WebSockets or response streaming
- Long-running or background work
- Your own server code in the same process. Run that as a separate service and call it
- Per-user authorization enforced outside the page
- Sites from mutually untrusted tenants on one host
- Anywhere you need a mature, certified platform
How it compares
| Static generator | Framework and your own server | Crisptastic | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pages are files | Yes | Often | Yes |
| Output per visitor | No | Yes | Yes |
| Forms and sessions | Bring a service | Build or add them | Built in |
| Your own server code | No | Yes | No, call a separate API |
| Background jobs, WebSockets | No | Yes | No |
| What you ship | A folder of files | An image or a build, plus a process | One signed, encrypted Capsule |
| What you run | A CDN | An app per site | One host for many sites |
How finished is it?
Young, and honest about it. The project's own website runs on a single host, and this is how each part is labelled today.
| Part | Status |
|---|---|
| Pages, routing, templating, sessions, forms | Working |
| Capsules and a single host | Working, in use on real sites |
| Route rate limits | Working |
| Embedded store per site | Working on a single host, not on a cluster |
| Stripe Checkout, S3, Cloudflare Images | Working, but the helper endpoints aren't authenticated. Read the caveats |
| Auth0 sign-in | Working, but early |
| Fabric clustering, Kismet ingress, sleeping sites | Preview |
llm, mail and arbax capabilities | Experimental |
Still open: independent security review, production certification of the whole system, backup and restore for a lost cluster, and release signing. The honest list has the rest.
Getting it
Crisptastic is a private release for Linux on x86-64 and macOS on Apple Silicon, and it's a compiled binary under the Frogfish Binary License. It isn't open source. If you'd like to try it, write to hello@frogfish.io.
Still curious? The Quickstart takes five minutes, and the security model says plainly what's protected and what isn't.