What is Bothy?
Bothy is a sync engine for applications that have no server of their own. Your app keeps its data in a local database on each device, and Bothy moves changes between the devices through files in the user’s own cloud storage, today Google Drive.
In Scotland and northern England, a bothy is an unlocked mountain shelter that belongs to no one: anyone may use it, and travellers leave notes and supplies for whoever comes next. Bothy works the same way. There is no server; devices drop off and pick up files at a shared place that the user owns.
Who it is for
Section titled “Who it is for”- Small and personal apps that need sync across a user’s devices but don’t want to run, secure and pay for a backend: note takers, task lists, journals, trackers, settings.
- Privacy-minded apps: the data never leaves the user’s own Google account, and it can be end-to-end encrypted with a password only the user knows.
- Robots and embedded boards: a Raspberry Pi class board takes missions from a phone and sends logs back, with no MQTT broker or server in between, even after days offline.
What you get
Section titled “What you get”- A local database per device (SQLite). Reads and writes never wait for the network.
- Collections of JSON documents, with
put,patch,get,list,deleteand a change stream. - Deterministic merging. Hybrid logical clocks and per-field last-writer-wins: every device converges to the same state, and a delete is never undone by an older edit. Overwritten values are kept in a conflict log.
- Background sync that is quick after local writes and polls the remote otherwise.
- Optional end-to-end encryption, with password changes that reach every device.
- Direct channels between devices that are online at the same time.
What it is not
Section titled “What it is not”- Not a real-time collaborative text editor: concurrent edits of the same field keep the newest one, they are not merged character by character.
- Not for sharing between different Google accounts. One database belongs to one user.
- Not a server database: there is no query engine across users, and one Google Cloud project’s Drive quota is shared by all of its users (see Limits and quota).
How it compares
Section titled “How it compares”| Bothy | Sync engines with a server (PowerSync, ElectricSQL, Replicache…) | CRDT libraries (Automerge, Yjs) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Server you run | none | yes | you bring the transport |
| Where data lives | the user’s Drive | your backend | wherever you put it |
| Offline-first | yes | yes | yes |
| Merge | per field, last writer wins | varies | character and structure level |
| Platforms | Rust, Flutter, Python, C, CLI | mostly web and mobile | many languages |
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