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Velve
A European cloud platform, built from further down than usual
Context
Every provider tells you your data stays where you put it. Almost nowhere is that a property of the system. It's configuration — and configuration can be wrong without anyone noticing.
We went at it from below.
What that means in practice is the part I'm not writing down yet. The surface will look ordinary: connect a repo, push, it runs. That's the point. The work sits somewhere most people never open.
Everything is public. The platform itself is still in development — nothing of the app is online yet, but it's coming. We think trust has to be earned rather than claimed, so the architecture papers will follow, in full detail.
Velve Auth is the first piece out the door, documented down to the decision process: what we chose, when, and why we ruled out the alternatives.
Why I built it
Because privacy on the internet keeps getting quieter, and almost nobody notices anymore.
Providers change their policies whenever it suits them. What you agreed to two years ago doesn't exist in that form today, and you find out by reading a changelog you didn't subscribe to. Meanwhile everyone ships faster than ever — Vercel, Supabase, and they're genuinely good, that's not the criticism. The criticism is that you can go from idea to production in an afternoon and nobody in the room ever asks where the user data actually ends up. Not out of malice. It just never comes up.
I wanted to build the thing where that question is already answered before anyone asks it. Where the answer isn't a policy that can change next quarter, but something about how the system is put together.
So I went underneath the platform instead of on top of it. Turns out that's where the problem was.
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