We're building the workspace we always wanted
A small team tired of tools that feel fast until you're offline, slow until you refresh, and collaborative until you actually need to collaborate.
It started with a broken Notion doc at 30,000 feet. No connection, no cache, just a spinner and a deadline. We'd been building on top of cloud-first tools for years and accepted the latency as the cost of collaboration.
We stopped accepting it. The research was already there — local-first computing had been a real idea since the late 90s. What was missing was a workspace app that took it seriously as a product constraint, not a research curiosity.
Zanbase started as a side project in late 2025. By January 2026 we had a sync engine we trusted. Everything else grew from that.
Most workspace tools are optimistic in name only. They show a spinner, fire a request, and update the UI when the server confirms. That's not optimistic — that's just async with a loading state.
True local-first means the read never waits. Your data lives in IndexedDB, the write updates the local store atomically before it touches the network, and the sync engine handles reconciliation in the background. If the push fails, the state rolls back. If you're offline for three days, your queue waits.
That's the system we built. It's not a UX trick — it changes what's architecturally possible.
Product walkthrough — 3 min
Sync engine, views, offline mode
Validate → optimistic UI → atomic IndexedDB persist → push. Every step is explicit. Failure at any point rolls back cleanly.
Always from IndexedDB. Never a network call for data that's already been synced. The server is write-through, not read-path.
UUIDv7 mutation keys make pushes idempotent. Dead letters are inspectable. The queue drains automatically on reconnect.
Presence rooms and broadcast sync via a lightweight collab server. Real-time without requiring a full CRDT for everyday use.
Reads never touch the network. The workspace is yours even when the internet isn't.
Every sync decision is explicit. You can inspect the mutation queue, retry dead letters, and understand exactly what the system is doing.
We don't upsell you into features you don't need. The free tier is real. Limits are clearly stated.
PostgreSQL, tRPC, Drizzle. Proven tools. We pick the dull choice over the clever one every time.
We'd rather have something working and rough than polished and late. Velocity is a feature.
We're a small team and we intend to stay that way. Every hire changes the shape of what we build, so we move slowly and look carefully.
If you care deeply about local-first architecture, developer experience, or making tools that feel genuinely fast — we'd like to hear from you.
Get in touch →