About Roe

Manifesto

Our decisions will always be guided by these principles.

Ownership

In the modern world, we trade ownership for convenience. Subscriptions are everywhere, everything rented, nothing is owned. That’s why Roe is local, file-first and self-hosted.

Privacy

We don’t host your site in the cloud. It’s on your device and so you can self-host. Your words, your media, your database… your site.

Longevity

Text is always going to work, for as long as computers exist. That’s why almost everything in Roe is in simple plain text files. Even the database is a text file. Your entire site is in one folder.

This is also why Static Site Generation was built in from the beginning. If any sites are going to work far into the future, it’s plain old HTML, CSS and vanilla JS.

Independence

Roe exists to help you be more independent. So you can do things without permission from our tech overlords. There are no investors here, no board of trustees, and no exit plan. Roe is founder and user-funded forever.

Focus

Attention is a moral act. What you attend to shapes the world you see. We will help you attend to what matters and we’ll strive to do the same.

Friction > comfort | Slow down!

Another feature of modernity is this drive towards one-click, one-prompt, do-it-for-me tools. Let’s call it fast-food-tech. Roe isn’t going to ‘do it all for you’. It IS going to make building sites and publishing them as simple and fun as possible; but it’s also going to teach you to put the process in your hands.

Who makes Roe?

A team of one… for now.

I’m Benjamin Welch and I built Roe. I’ve been making websites for over two decades, a lot of side projects and plenty of client sites. I’d been thinking about some version of Roe for twenty years, so when writer I follow reached out to ask if I could help him get off WordPres and Substack, I thought, why not build the tool I’ve always wanted to use?

It’s the best way to make websites as far as I’m concerned. I hope you give it a try. If you run into any issues, have questions/suggestions, please reach out: roe@weareontheweb.com and I’ll help.