Decent Portal - Coming Soon

We are preparing to open the Decent Portal. We're looking for web developers to work with in an open source collaboration to bring apps to the portal. If you are interested, please contact us at launch@decentapps.net.

Check out Hone for a working example of a decent app.

The Decent Portal Vision

  • Safe - Users can trust all apps on the portal as respecting their privacy and providing a non-manipulative experience.
  • Easy - Developers can release LLM-based software in a low-stakes way, without needing to find a way to pay for hosting.
  • Playful - The reduced friction for users and developers allows for playful experimentation and discovery.

Founder Erik Hermansen details his research that led to initiating this project in his 2024 article Zero-Cost LLMs in Web Apps.

The Decent Architecture

To make this work, we've employed a local-first-like (explanation) architecture specifically targeted to LLM-based web apps.

sequence diagram of LLM interactions in a browser
  • LLMs are loaded into the browser via the WebLLM library.
  • LLMs are cached so that return trips to the Decent Portal are loaded more quickly from the cache. (Browser-persistent storage is unique per domain.)
  • We encourage app developers to use certain "default models" (e.g., Llama 8b) so that users are more likely to already have an LLM cached when they visit an app.
  • Service calls aren't allowed from apps, with a few minor exceptions and read-only fetch workarounds. CSP headers, SAST, and other guardrails are used to protect from service calls being made from apps, including supply chain attacks.
  • App developers that want to save user data can use browser persistent storage options like IndexedDb. We provide a per-developer subdomain (e.g., devname.decentapps.net) to avoid cross-app data tampering.

As the apps are purely static content, we can host nearly everything on a regional CDN. The decentapps.net website loads from a synchronized collection of origin and cache servers to serve performantly across the globe.

regional CDN locations

Plans for the Future

We will open the portal once we have enough apps to present a viable user experience. This work may be accelerated by releasing existing open source apps that already fit the Decent architecture. But we will also work with developers to release new apps as well.

Beyond that, there are many more capabilities we'd like to add that move decent apps closer to local-first principles like cross-device synchronization. But first, we'll focus on opening a portal that represents the safe+easy+playful vision.