Life & fun · December 20, 2023
Flat – a minimalist teamwork app that protects focus (live demo)
Hi HN! We're Seth, Andrew, & Marcin. After a decade of wanting a simple, lightweight teamwork tool and not finding one, we decided to build one ourselves. We’re calling it Flat, and we have two main goals: 1. Everyone can figure it out in just a few minutes, from the intern to the zero-patience CEO. 2. It doesn’t create extra work for anybody. Everything written in Flat would have been written somewhere anyway; Flat just provides an obvious, consistent place to put it. If you check out the demo, please let us know how you think we’re doing on these goals and where we could do better. (Mobile…
In plain words
Flat is a minimalist teamwork application designed to be learned quickly by any team member and to streamline communication without creating additional work. The tool consolidates information that would normally be scattered across multiple platforms into one consistent, obvious place. It prioritizes asynchronous communication over real-time chat, aiming to reduce miscommunication and help teams focus on actual work. Flat is currently available on desktop only.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
In the maker’s words, at launch
Hi HN! We're Seth, Andrew, & Marcin. After a decade of wanting a simple, lightweight teamwork tool and not finding one, we decided to build one ourselves. We’re calling it Flat, and we have two main goals: 1. Everyone can figure it out in just a few minutes, from the intern to the zero-patience CEO. 2. It doesn’t create extra work for anybody. Everything written in Flat would have been written somewhere anyway; Flat just provides an obvious, consistent place to put it. If you check out the demo, please let us know how you think we’re doing on these goals and where we could do better. (Mobile users, there’s a video for you since Flat is desktop-only at the moment.) Also: we think it's crazy that work communication has become so dominated by synchronous chat e.g. Slack and Teams over the past decade. It's too easy for balls to get dropped, it’s hard to get real work done, and it's hard to find things. Chat is great for some things, but we don’t think it should be the center of our work lives or the system of record. So Flat includes async discussion threads that are as quick and easy as chat but without the downsides. You can read more about why we're building Flat at https://flat.app/why. Coming soon: private workspaces & quick edits. HN FAQ ----------- How baked is this? We’re still in beta, but it’s pretty darn baked. What’s your business model? No-nonsense SaaS. We’re currently in beta and free for all teams, but you can find our future pricing on our homepage. Does this have a proper integration with GitHub? Yes it does, because we're using Flat to build Flat! Is this an “alternative to Jira”? Ha, no. Though… some teams have in fact migrated to Flat from Jira. So, maybe? Is this an “opinionated” tool? Yes and no. Flat eschews complex features in favor of a small set of simple primitives (workspaces, topics, tasks, and threads). But Flat has no opinion about how you should work. Is there a dark mode? You bet. It's in the demo, try it! What's your stack? React, TS, PostgreSQL & Replicache (all data’s local, and Flat works offline) Do you have a mobile app? Not yet, but we will. We've been focused on making the desktop experience great first. Hang on, is this an Electron app? You got us! Feel free to use Flat in-browser if that offends you.
Does the same job
all alternatives →- FAFlat – a minimalist teamwork app that protects focus (live demo)2024 · ▲6
Hi HN! We're Seth, Andrew, & Marcin. After a decade of wanting a simple, lightweight teamwork tool and not finding one, we decided to build one ourselves. You can try out what we're building in a sandbox demo here: https://try.flat.app. We’re calling it Flat, and we have two main goals: 1. Everyone can figure it out in just a few minutes, from the intern to the zero-patience CEO. 2. It doesn’t create extra work for anybody. Everything written in Flat would have been written somewhere anyway; Flat just provides an obvious, consistent place to put it. If you check out the demo,…
- FSFlat – simple task tracking that stays out of your way2024 · flat.app · ▲30
Hi HN! Flat’s a lot like Trello, but with a cleaner, simpler, friendlier UI and real discussion threads. Flat also sports a first-class GitHub integration. To take it for a spin without signing up, just go to https://try.flat.app. And there’s also a quick demo video here: https://youtu.be/NW2c9cZVaD0 We made Flat for ourselves, after a decade of wanting a simple, lightweight tool to stay on top of our work and not finding one. Trello is close, but we find it really frustrating to use in lots of ways. And most everything else is way too complex. We think there’s a…
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Hi HN! I'm Kam, the founder and one of the authors of Linen. Today, we are launching Linen.team (https://linen.team/), a lightweight threaded messaging app for your team. Modern workplace messaging apps (like Slack) are based on IRC, which is great for small groups, but as it scales, breaks down quickly: you either get overwhelmed by notifications or you have to turn them all off. Most chat apps have threads tacked on but aren't built from the ground up with this design in mind. We wanted to create a thread-first experience where you can organize and prioritize conversations…
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