Lagniappe is a private, self-hosted workspace for structured records, documents, tasks, files, search, and permissions. It is designed for people who like keeping their operational data in infrastructure they control rather than in a consumer SaaS account.
The closest comparison is a small internal system that borrows ideas from Notion, Airtable, Evernote, Google Docs, and task trackers. The emphasis is a little different: durability, ownership, access control, exportability, and practical workflows come before polish or marketplace integrations.
Fast When Awake, Inexpensive When Idle
Lagniappe is designed to run economically without keeping an App Engine server running around the clock. The default deployment can sleep when nobody is using it, which can make a substantial difference to the monthly hosting cost.
The first page after an idle period may take a little longer—usually less than a minute—while the server starts. Owners who prefer an always-warm server can switch to automatic scaling under Admin, Settings, then Deployment, usually at a higher cost. See Deployment Settings for the complete steps.
Good Fit
- Personal operations: properties, equipment, household records, projects, contractors, documents, and recurring work.
- Small organizations that need private records, roles, files, tasks, and forms without buying into a large platform.
- Workflows where a page needs both narrative documents and structured data.
- Teams that care about permission boundaries before sending context to AI.
Less of a Fit
A few situations where something else is probably the better tool:
- You want a polished notes app with zero setup and no cloud account to manage.
- You need offline-first local files, end-to-end encryption, or peer-to-peer sync.
- You want a general spreadsheet replacement or a full project-management suite with boards, sprints, and reporting dashboards.
- You would rather rely on a vendor’s support contract than on source code and your own infrastructure.
Core Concepts
Forms
Forms define structured fields: text, dates, selects, checkboxes, tables, links, locations, signatures, and more. They also act as content types.
Categories
Categories group pages. A category can have a default form, and individual pages can use different forms when a category contains several related types.
Pages
Pages are the main records. A page can have a document, form data, tasks, files, notes, and permissions.
Tasks
Tasks live on pages. They can recur, collect form data, keep history, and be assigned without losing the context of the page they belong to.
Projects
Projects collect related work across many pages. They can define task templates and provide an aggregated view of tasks that still live on pages.
Files
Files are stored in your cloud storage bucket. They can be attached to pages or tasks, extracted for search, summarized, or imported from CSV.
Connected Workspace
Lagniappe is more graph-like than a plain document folder. A page can be a durable record, a document, a form submission, a task hub, and a file cabinet at the same time. Categories, projects, forms, model tasks, links, and attachments give those records shape without forcing everything into one table or one outline.
That matters for operational memory. A contractor, property, repair, invoice, inspection task, and uploaded photo can all stay connected while still being useful on their own. Projects can gather work across many pages, and model tasks can describe repeated patterns of work without losing the page where each task actually belongs.
Design Choices
- Server-rendered pages. Permissions are enforced before HTML is sent to the browser.
- Owned infrastructure. The app runs in your Google Cloud project, using your storage, database, auth, and AI account.
- Structured data plus documents. Freeform writing and database-like fields are designed to live together.
- Plain web foundations. Flask, Jinja, HTML, CSS, and vanilla JavaScript keep the app less tied to frontend framework churn.
These choices keep the app durable and inspectable. The tradeoff is a bit more setup up front and a handful fewer conveniences than fully hosted software.
Open Source
Lagniappe is licensed under the AGPL 3.0 or later license. You can run it yourself, modify it, and inspect how your data is handled. If you offer a modified version as a hosted service, the license requires sharing that source code under the same terms.