About melonfleet
melonfleet is a hobby workshop for self-hostable IT tools. The first one out of the door is Flotilla, a native macOS app for Apple’s container runtime.
The short version
By day, the person behind melonfleet keeps fleets running — Macs, printers, the usual IT grind. By night, those same problems get re-approached for fun: what would a small-business / school stack look like if you built it from scratch, kept it self-hosted, and owed nothing to the enterprise vendor catalogue?
Small tools, done properly
Enterprise IT stacks are usually one expensive platform or a pile of unrelated tools that never talk. The interesting middle path is a set of focused tools that each stand on their own and can be joined up later — built at a scale and price that fits a small shop rather than a Fortune 500 RFP.
Flotilla is the first of those to be finished and released. More are being worked on, and they get announced when they work, not when they are planned.
Built with AI, on purpose
Every melonfleet tool is designed and written hand-in-hand with an AI assistant. That’s half the point — an ongoing experiment in how far one curious person and a capable pair-programmer can get. Architecture, code, branding, even this page: worked out in conversation.
The ethos
Self-hosted first. Independent. No lock-in, free defaults, and software you run on hardware you actually own. Nothing here phones home to a cloud you didn’t choose. It’s built the way a home cook tends a garden — for the pleasure of it, and because the shop-bought version wasn’t quite right.
Nothing serious
melonfleet isn’t a company and nothing here is for sale. It’s a playground. If a tool turns out useful to you too — wonderful, that’s a bonus. For now, it’s for the joy of making things.