Manifest

The internet most people use today is not the internet we were promised. It is four or five large rectangles owned by four or five large companies, with the rest of the web reduced to a forgotten basement we sometimes link to.

Open the average European phone. Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, WhatsApp, Gmail, a tab of Google with AI summarising the answer above the links. Every cultural surface is rented from someone else, and the rent is your attention, your data, your time. The actual web — the open, weird, hand-built web — is still there, but the doors are harder to find.

Pixelplots is one of those doors. A 200×200 grid. Forty thousand permanent plots. You buy one, once. You upload an image. You point it at a link. You own that tiny rectangle of the public internet, and nobody can renew it out from under you, change the terms, suspend your account for an opaque policy violation, or quietly bury it under a recommended feed.

A short lineage

In 2005, a British student named Alex Tew sold a million pixels for a dollar each to pay for university. The Million Dollar Homepage is still online. It is a strange, beautiful artefact of an internet where strangers paid attention to other strangers' tiny projects. After that came InternetTiles, a quieter imitator, and a long tail of pixel-art bulletin boards that mostly disappeared.

We are the next one. We are aware that this is, in many ways, a silly format. We think the silliness is the point.

What we are not

We are not a platform. We do not have a feed. There is no algorithm deciding which tiles you should look at. There is no daily streak. We do not, and will never, train an AI model on what you put on your tile, because there is nothing here to train on except other people's drawings of pixel cats and small business logos.

We are not a community. You don't need an account to look at the map. You don't need followers. You don't need to be relevant. You bought a square. The square stays.

We are not infinite. There are forty thousand tiles. When they are all claimed, that's it. We won't quietly extend the grid to keep selling — the artificial scarcity is half of what makes the artefact mean anything.

What we are

A small, weird, intentionally retro art project that happens to also be a business. Pixelplots is operated by Aetheron AB, a Swedish limited company, from Stockholm. The servers are in Frankfurt. The payments go through Stripe and NOWPayments. The pixels are stored in Supabase. None of this is hidden.

We charge real money for a tile because hosting it forever costs real money. The price climbs as the map fills up — not because we are greedy, but because the late tiles are the scarce ones, and the early tiles deserve to feel like a bet that paid off.

You can pay in euros via card, or in ETH, USDC, USDT, or DAI via NOWPayments. You can decline to give us your email if you want. You can pixel-art whatever you want, within the limits of European law (no CSAM, no IP infringement, no incitement of hatred — the boring, obvious limits).

The deal

You give us a few euros once. We host your tile, with no subscription, for as long as Aetheron AB continues to exist. If we ever shut down, we will publish the full grid as an open dataset — every image, every URL, every coordinate — so the artefact survives outside of us.

We will not pivot. There will be no Pixelplots Pro, no Pixelplots Enterprise, no premium animated frames for €4.99 a month. The product is the grid. The grid is the product.

Why bother

Because the indie web is mostly a memory and we miss it. Because every cultural object online has been optimised into a beige rectangle and we are tired of beige rectangles. Because somewhere out there a teenager will look at the map, notice that all the cool plots are taken, and decide to build something stranger themselves. That is the only growth metric we care about.

Welcome to Pixelplots. Pick a coordinate. We'll keep it warm for you.

— The Pixelplots team