Why I'm Asking You to Donate to Cute Desk App

Every day, somewhere in 68 countries, someone opens a new tab in Chrome or Safari and sees something I made. Eight months ago it was a clock on my own screen. Today it is 32 widgets, and every one of them is free.

Cute Desk App has been free since the first day, and it stays free: no ads, no accounts, no premium tier. I am very proud of that. But free to use is not free to run, and this week I sat down with the bills. So, for the first time, I am asking for a donation, and I want to tell you honestly why.

How it started

Cute Desk App started as a small HTML file on my own machine: a clock, the weather and a calendar, opened in every new browser tab because I wanted a browser start page that felt like mine. That file lasted about a week before I decided to build it properly. Thirty-two days and twenty milestones later, on February 26, 2026, I launched it with fifteen widgets.

I have been building apps since I was 16 years old, and I have never had more fun than in those thirty-two days. I was the user, the designer and the builder at the same time. There was no roadmap and no meeting. If I wanted a Pomodoro timer, I built the Pomodoro widget. If a desk plant made me smile, the Plant widget went in. Code is how I make art, and Cute Desk App became the place where I get to make it for you.

If you work in product, you will recognize what happened there. The user was me, the stakeholder was me and the builder was me. As a product manager, I would call that instant product-market fit. As a person, it just felt like play.

What happened next

People found it. Not through ads, because there are none, but through search, through friends, and lately through AI assistants that recommend it when someone asks for a good browser start page. In March I translated the whole app into Spanish, French and German. In June I released the Chrome and Safari extensions, so Cute Desk App opens in every new browser tab without a bookmark. Fifteen widgets became thirty-two, in seven categories, from office and productivity tools to games.

And the map filled in. In the last 90 days, people from 68 countries used Cute Desk App. Every dark dot below is a country where someone opened it.

The curve I care about most is not the total. It is whether people come back. Both lines below start at 100% on the first week of the last 90 days. New users each week are up 241%. People who come back each week are up 134%.

I read every message that comes through the Help page. People write to tell me which widget they open first in the morning, what they wish it did, and sometimes just to say thank you. That is what keeps me at the keyboard at night. Many of the widgets you see today started as one of those messages.

The office widgets, and why I built them

This September I built three widgets and took Cute Desk App to a whole new level: the Sheets widget, the Notes widget and the Canvas widget.

Microsoft charges you for Office 365. Google nudges you toward a paid plan. Apple now charges for iWork, its own office suite. And let's not even talk about Adobe, whose Photoshop subscription costs more in a month than most people would ever give to an app like this in a year. Every one of them wants a subscription for tools that most people use for the same handful of things: a quick table with a SUM, a document with headings and a list, a banner for a post. Those everyday basics are what I built into the widgets. I believe the Sheets widget, the Notes widget and the Canvas widget cover 90% of what most people will ever need from an office suite, and they cost nothing.

I am not saying software should be free. Building it and running it costs money, and I understand that better now than I ever did. The difference is who decides. With a subscription, they decide what you pay, every month, whether you used the tool or not. With Cute Desk App, you decide. Everything stays free, and if you give something, it is because you wanted to.

The Sheets widget is a mini-Excel. Real formulas with a formula bar and a function picker, several sheets per document, currency and percent formats, borders and colors, CSV import and export, and undo. The Notes widget writes the way you would in Word: a formatting toolbar, headings, lists, checklists and tables, and it opens the Markdown documents an AI hands you and keeps their structure. The Canvas widget is a mini-Photoshop: photos, text, shapes and stickers as layers, crop and adjustments, speech bubbles and arrows for marking up a screenshot, and export as PNG, JPEG or WebP.

Those three widgets took me close to a month, and most of it went into taste: the small decisions that make a tool feel easy in your hands. A spreadsheet with every feature of Excel would be a worse widget, not a better one. I kept the toolbar to the buttons you already know, moved things by a few pixels until they sat right, and made sure undo takes you back exactly one step. None of that is a feature, and all of it is the difference between a widget you try once and one you open every morning. The goal of the widgets' user interface was simple, standard and familiar, so that your hands already know what to do.

What it costs

Free to use does not mean free to run. Keeping Cute Desk App alive costs me money, and I pay for it myself. Every day the app needs hosting and a global content network so it opens fast in every country. The Chat widget answers questions with a language model that I pay for per answer. The blog audio and the widget images live in cloud storage. Domains and certificates come up for renewal. All of it adds up to a larger cost, one that grows with every new user, and the curves above show where that is going.

I could put ads on it. I could add a premium tier and lock the Sheets widget behind it. I won't, because that is not the app I wanted to make, and it is not the app you chose. The only other option is to ask, so I am asking.

How you can help

If Cute Desk App makes your day a little better, please consider a donation. You can give once, with any amount you like, or set up a monthly or yearly donation and forget about it. Payments are handled by Stripe, I never see your card details, and a recurring donation can be cancelled at any time.

And if you can't donate, that is completely fine. Nothing changes. Every widget stays free for you, and the best thing you can do costs nothing: install the Chrome or Safari extension, use Cute Desk App every day, and tell one friend about it.

Thank you for using something I made. It means a lot to me, more than you know.