The small web is coming back

Something is happening in the indie corners of the internet that I don't think has a name yet. People are building websites for audiences of a hundred. Shops with twelve products. Portfolios for photographers whose best clients are their neighbors. Blogs about one specific subject for one specific kind of reader. None of this is new, exactly — the personal web has always existed — but it's more interesting now than it has been since the early blogging era, and I think it's going to keep getting more interesting.

For a long time, the dominant story on the web was that everything should scale. Your website should reach a hundred thousand people. Your newsletter should have a hundred thousand subscribers. Your shop should do a hundred thousand dollars in monthly revenue. If you weren't on that curve, you were a hobbyist, and hobbyist was pejorative.

That story is quietly losing its grip. You see it in the kinds of projects people are building, and the kinds of projects people are writing about with affection. A lot of the work that feels freshest in 2026 has an audience of one.

Why it's coming back

Three things happened at roughly the same time, and they reinforce each other.

The web got too commercial, too fast.By the early 2020s, most of what most people encountered online was a SaaS dashboard or a social media feed optimized for engagement. Neither of those feels like a place you'd hang out if you had a choice. People started looking for alternatives — Are.na, Tiny Awards, the small-web movement, personal sites with real personalities. These are still niche but they're growing.

Making a website got trivially cheap.It used to cost two or three weeks of work and five hundred dollars to get a small personal site online. Now you can have one by lunchtime for the price of nothing. The economic floor to publishing on your own domain has dropped to zero. This doesn't just let more people publish — it changes the kind of thing that's worth publishing. You can make a website for eight people without feeling foolish about it.

The tools for tiny businesses got good. Stripe. Neon. Cloudflare. Vercel. A small suite of infrastructure that a single person can wire together on a weekend. A small shop with twelve products and a custom domain is no longer a technical project. It's a Saturday.

What small projects get right

Large projects have to be defensive. They have to serve a thousand use cases, support five personas, pass legal review, ship on a quarterly roadmap, and not embarrass any of the twelve people who signed off on the launch.

Small projects get to be specific. They can address one kind of person by name. They can be about one narrow topic with confidence. They can use a palette the designer actually loves instead of one that's been A/B tested to offend no one. They can have a typography voice. They can have opinions. They can be wrong.

This is why the small web, when it's good, is so much more interesting to read than the corporate web. You're not reading the average of everything. You're reading one specific person's take.

The economics of a hundred readers

There's a quiet economic revolution inside the shift toward the small web, and it's worth naming explicitly.

For most of the web era, the only viable model for an independent creator was to aggregate attention at scale. Ads paid you a few dollars per thousand pageviews, so you needed a lot of pageviews. Subscriptions paid you maybe fifty dollars a year, so you needed a lot of subscribers. The business model pushed every creator toward trying to reach everyone, which pushed their content toward the bland middle.

Now — and this is the genuinely new thing — a small shop with a hundred customers paying a hundred dollars a year is a viable business. A newsletter with eight hundred readers can support the writer part-time. A portfolio that gets ten inquiries a year is more than enough for a freelance photographer. The unit economics changed. You can stop trying to reach everyone and start making something specific enough that the right hundred people find it on their own.

What to make, if you're starting

If you're reading this and thinking about building something small on the web, here are the kinds of projects that tend to do surprisingly well:

A portfolio with opinions.Not a grid of thumbnails. A real personal site — an essay about how you work, a short list of projects with specific stories, an about page that doesn't hedge. The good clients will find it.

A tiny shop.Three to twelve products that you've made with care. A cookbook. A zine. A set of ceramics. A guide you've written. The margin on twelve things you love is higher than the margin on a thousand things you don't.

A single-subject blog. Write about one thing at a time. Neapolitan pizza. The history of brutalist typography. The specific mechanics of a niche hobby. The more specific you are, the larger the audience of the exact right people.

A reservation or booking site for a small business. The local café, the yoga studio, the wedding photographer. These used to cost thousands of dollars to build. Now they cost an afternoon. The neighborhood is full of them.

The pace of the small web

The thing I like most about the shift is that it slows everything down. Making for a small audience means you don't have to ship every week. You can sit with a project until it's right. You can sit with a sentence until it's the one you wanted. You can spend four hours choosing a color and have that be a reasonable way to have spent four hours.

Most of the software culture we've absorbed from the venture-backed era treats that kind of care as waste. You're supposed to ship, iterate, learn, and move on. And that's fine for businesses optimizing for scale. But it isn't the only valid way to make things, and it isn't the way the best small things get made.

The small web is coming back because enough people are tired of the big one. Go make something tiny.