Ellenial
The code behind ellenial.app: the library page for Ellenial, small tools that make everyday life a little easier. Free and private.
Made by Ellen, one person, with AI helping on the code.
What every tool stands for
- Free, never paywalled. No ads, no trackers.
- Your data stays on your phone where possible; when it has to travel, it's encrypted.
- Open source when published, so you can see exactly how it works.
- Costs in the open: the receipt on the site is updated every month. Making profits will never be the goal.
How the site works
- One static page, in English (
/) and Swedish (/sv). No cookies, no analytics, no forms, no database.
page/index.html is the layout; the words live in page/strings/en.json and page/strings/sv.json. The build writes one page per language and stops if a language is missing a text.- The receipt's numbers and "last updated" date live once in
page/receipt.json, shared by both languages.
- Language: an EN | SV switch in the header. Without a choice, the phone's own language setting decides (Swedish phones get
/sv, everyone else English). This is read on the phone only (site/lang.js); nothing about the visitor is sent or looked up. A choice made with the switch is remembered on that phone only. A link to /sv always opens in Swedish.
- Fonts (Fraunces and DM Sans) are bundled from npm at build time and served from this site, so no third party sees visitors.
- Strict security headers in
vercel.json.
- Hosted on Vercel: every push to
main deploys to ellenial.app.
Build locally: npm install && npm run build, then open dist/index.html.
Drawings
Ellen's hand-drawn icons (Procreate) live in one place for every Ellenial app: ellenial.app/drawings shows them all, drawings.json lists them for apps, and each is a 512 px PNG at ellenial.app/drawings/<name>.png. Originals (1024 px) and the build script are in art/drawings; run python3 art/drawings/build.py after adding or changing one. Other Ellenial sites can load them directly (they're served with Cross-Origin-Resource-Policy: cross-origin), or copy them in. The drawings are licensed CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 (credit Ellen Nilsson / Ellenial, no commercial use, remixes under the same licence), separately from the AGPL-3.0 code.
Credits
credits.json lists every free and open project the Ellenial apps build on: licence, the exact credit line, which apps use it and how to support it. It will feed ellenial.app/thanks and each app's credit lines. Paid services (Vercel, Supabase, Claude) are on the receipt instead.
Licence
AGPL-3.0. See LICENSE.
