Six hippos, one herd

Welcome to the
hippo herd

A small family of free, open-source tools that run on your machine and keep to themselves. No accounts, no telemetry, no cloud waiting to be configured — just software that works when the wifi doesn't.

Meet the herd View on GitHub

macOS · Windows · Linux  ·  iOS & Android soon  ·  Free & open source

Every hippo, and what it's for

Each one solves a problem its author had, properly rather than broadly. They share a look, a licence, and a refusal to talk to anything you didn't ask them to.

Detected — download buttons below are picked to match.

Rest Hippo

REST API client

A free, offline alternative to Postman and Insomnia. Collections are plain files on your disk, HTTP runs outside the browser so nothing is subject to CORS, and there is no account to make.

Electron · Vanilla JS macOS · Windows · Linux

Chip Hippo

TTL breadboard simulator

A desktop playground for 74xx TTL logic. Drop chips on an infinite breadboard, wire them up, hit Run — and watch electricity ripple through every net until the circuit settles.

Electron · Vanilla JS macOS · Windows · Linux

Jump Hippo

On-demand SSH tunnels

Bind a local port and the SSH tunnel opens the moment something touches it — through a chain of jump hosts if you need one — then tears itself down once the port goes idle.

Electron · Vanilla JS macOS · Windows · Linux

Keep Hippo

Vault-compatible secrets manager

A from-scratch secrets manager that speaks HashiCorp Vault's HTTP API, so the Vault clients you already have keep working. Server, CLI and web console in one Go binary.

Pre-release Go · single binary macOS · Linux · Windows

Mind Hippo

ML runtime, from scratch

Tensors, autodiff, neural networks and an inference server — written in pure Go against the standard library. No framework, no GPU, no cgo, and no hosted model behind any of it.

In development Go · no dependencies macOS · Linux · Windows

Roll Hippo

Shake-to-roll dice tray

The herd's first mobile app. Set your dice up once, and after that the phone is the tray — hold it upright, shake it, set it down, read the result.

Planned Flutter · Dart iOS · Android

What every hippo agrees on

Different problems, same principles — and they are not marketing lines, they are constraints the code is written under.

Offline first, and offline last

Every hippo does its whole job with the network unplugged. Anything that does reach out — an SSH tunnel, an HTTP request — reaches where you pointed it and nowhere else.

No accounts, no telemetry

Nothing to sign into, nothing phoning home, no analytics, no crash beacon, no update ping. There is no server to hold your data because there is no server.

Your data stays yours

Files in directories you can see, back up, and read without the app that made them. Nothing is locked in a proprietary store you have to export from.

Open source, free forever

Apache 2.0 across the herd, MPL 2.0 for Keep Hippo. Every line is on GitHub — read it, fork it, build it yourself if you'd rather not trust a binary.

Native on all three desktops

macOS, Windows and Linux, on Intel and on ARM, built from the same source with the same features. No platform is the afterthought.

Documented properly

Each hippo ships a real user guide written alongside it, hosted and in-repo from one source, so the two cannot disagree.