The 512KB Club
28 comments
·November 4, 2025continuational
Seems like we can join the club! https://www.firefly-lang.org/ is 218 kB uncompressed.
unglaublich
Building a sub 512KB website is trivial.
Just don't use external trackers, ads, fonts, videos.
Building a sub 512KB website that satisfies all departments of a company of non-trivial size; that is hard.
bilekas
> Building a sub 512KB website is trivial.
Even for larger sites, it can be trivial, but I prefer to look at it from a non SPA/state-mgmt point of view.
Not every site needs to be an SPA. Or even a 'react app'. I visit a page, record your metrics on the backend for all I care, you have the request headers etc, just send me the data I need, nothing else.
It doesn't have to be ugly or even lacking some flair, 500KB is a lot of text. Per page request, with ootb browser caching, there's no excuse. People have forgotten that's all you need.
> People have forgotten that's all you need.
Edit : No they havent, they just can't monetize optimizations.
scatbot
I get the appeal of the 512KB Club. Most modern websites are bloat, slow and a privacy nightmare. I even get the nerdy thrill of fitting an entire website into a single IP packet, but honestly, this obsession with raw file size is kinda boring. It just encourages people micromanage whitespace, skip images or cut features like accessibility or responsive layouts.
A truly "suckless" website isn't about size. It's one that uses non-intrusive JS, embraces progressive enhancement, prioritizes accessibility, respects visitor's privacy and looks clean and functional on any device or output medium. If it ends up small: great! But that shouldn't be the point.
wredcoll
A rather perfect example of "correlation is not causation". But being "suckless" is a lot harder to measure than just running `length(string)`.
null
timenotwasted
It's a fun way to push for a lighter web but without a way to distinguish the complexity of the sites on the list it's really not all that useful. It's kind of addressed in the FAQ "The whole point of the 512KB Club is to showcase what can be done with 512KB of space. Anyone can come along and make a <10KB site containing 3 lines of CSS and a handful of links to other pages" but without a way for the user to distinguish the site complexity at a glance I'm not sure I understand the point. Regardless of the FAQ the first few sites I clicked on while yes were quite light in size but also had nothing more than some text and background colors on their sites. Also any search site is going to be at the near top of the list e.g. https://steamosaic.com/
Complexity would be a subjective metric but without it I'm not sure what you take from this other than a fun little experiment, which is maybe all it's meant to be.
unglaublich
So they should invert it like the demoscene.
Set the limit first, and then request folks to join the contest:
What crazy website can _you_ build in 512KB?
adamzwasserman
Tag-based organization system with drag-drop, real-time filtering, row/column layouts. ~55KB gzipped.
Built it frustrated with Trello's limitations. The 512KB constraint forced good architecture: server-side rendering, progressive enhancement, shared indexes instead of per-item duplication. Perfect Lighthouse score so far - the real test is keeping it through release.
Extracting patterns into genX framework (genx.software) for release later this month.
timenotwasted
"What crazy website can _you_ build in 512KB?" Exactly! That would be super fun and interesting.
Amorymeltzer
Most thorough discussion here from a few years ago: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30125633>
Seems like lichess dropped off
bilekas
> Why does any site need to be that huge? It’s crazy.
It's advertising and data tracking.. Every. Single. Time.
PiHole/Adblocker have become essential for traversing the cesspool that is the modern internet.
skydhash
While a lot of sites break when you disable JavaScript, browsing is very fluid when you do. I’m also using the html version of DDG. There’s only an handful of websites (and the majority are apps) that I’ve enabled JS for.
And one of these days, I will write a viewer for GitHub links, that will clone the repo and allows me to quickly browse it. For something that is aimed at dev, the platform is horrendous.
opengrass
14KB Club > 512KB Club
lloydatkinson
There’s basically nothing on that list lol. Is there a list of all these N-KB Club sites?
namegulf
Not sure how a site can fit in that club?
For e.g., if someone uses Google Analytics, that alone comes to 430kb (which most people do)
undeveloper
Then don't use google analytics.
namegulf
One option is to use access logs on the server and process stats
xigoi
Back in the early internet, nobody had enough bandwidth to transmit 512 kB in a reasonable time, so clearly it has to be possible.
inetknght
> For e.g., if someone uses Google Analytics, that alone comes to 430kb (which most people do)
Perhaps someone might not use Google Analytics. Perhaps someone might apply 430kb to actual content instead.
skydhash
It’s very easy. 512kb can fit a whole novel in epub format. And HTML is a very verbose language.
namegulf
Just sticking with html, it's easy peasy
01HNNWZ0MV43FF
I've never used it. Some browsers even honor that stupid beacon header now too
The 512KB limit isn't just minimalism - it forces architectural discipline.
I built a Trello alternative (frustrated with limitations: wanted rows and decent performance). Came in at ~55KB gzipped by following patterns, some of which I'm open sourcing as genX (genx.software - releasing this month):
- Server renders complete HTML (not JSON that needs client-side parsing) - JavaScript progressively enhances (doesn't recreate what's in the DOM) - Shared data structures (one index for all items, not one per item) - Use native browser features (DOM is already a data structure - article coming)
Most sites ship megabytes because modern tooling treats size as a rounding error. The 512KB constraint makes you think about what's expensive and get creative. Got rewarded with a perfect Lighthouse score in dev - striving to maintain it through release.
Would love feedback from this community when it's out.