Any local service becomes a public endpoint supported protocols
If it speaks TCP on localhost, Airweb can expose it. HTTP and HTTPS get a shareable subdomain; raw-TCP services get a public host:port assigned by the server.
Get a local app online in three steps
-
Get your key
Open the dashboard, click Create account, and save the downloaded
airweb.fyi_. Your Ed25519 key is your account — no password, no email._key.txt -
Run one SSH command
Point an
ssh -Rat Airweb. The local port is whatever your app already listens on; the public side is the Airweb host.ssh -i ./airweb.fyi_
_key.txt -p 2222 -R 80:localhost:3000 tunnel@airweb.fyi For raw TCP (databases, SSH, game servers, RDP, …) use
-R 0:localhost:<port>— the server picks a free public port and prints it. -
Share the URL — and earn while it runs
HTTP tunnels get a
<sub>.airweb.fyiURL; raw TCP tunnels getairweb.fyi:<assigned>. Every minute it stays up, you earn 1 credit / min. List it on the marketplace to earn lease income on top.
What you can do with it
Make spare devices useful
That old MacBook in a drawer or the Raspberry Pi on your shelf can quietly serve real traffic. Plug it in, run one ssh command, and it joins the network as a working node.
Demo your app in 30 seconds
Spin up a local server, open a tunnel, paste the public URL into a meeting chat. No deploys, no Dockerfiles, no CI — just the code you already have running on localhost.
Reach your home computer anywhere
Claim a permanent <handle>.airweb.fyi for your home box. Files, dashboards, game servers, SSH-into-your-desktop — all reachable from a phone on the other side of the world.
Lease a micro-server by the minute
Need a public endpoint for a webhook test, a workshop, or a weekend project? Rent someone else's tunnel for a few minutes with the credits you earned hosting yours. No monthly bills.
Pay only for the traffic you use
No subscriptions. No "free tier" cliffs. Opening a tunnel is free — you're billed in credits only for the bytes that actually flow through it, and you earn credits every minute your own devices are serving traffic.
Idle tunnels cost nothing. The dashboard shows a live earn-vs-charge meter and a 24-hour ledger so the math is never a mystery.
A marketplace, not a billing portal
Airweb is built around a simple loop: plug in a spare device, share its uptime, earn credits, spend them on capacity from other people. Every node is also a customer.
Open marketplace
List your spare-device tunnel, set a price per minute, and watch the leases come in. Browse what others offer and rent the right region or hardware for the job.
Learn by hosting
Real reverse SSH, real TCP, real metering. The repo is open source — read it, fork it, and use Airweb to teach yourself the bits of infrastructure that schools rarely cover.
Reach any region
Hosts on the marketplace are spread across home connections in many cities. Rent a node where your users actually are.
Credits go both ways
Today's host is tomorrow's renter. The same wallet that earns your uptime rewards pays for the leases you take — no separate billing surface.
The long view: a micro-server socio-economy
The world is full of perfectly good hardware sitting idle — a billion phones, a hundred million laptops, racks of "obsolete" servers. They have CPU, memory, and bandwidth that today goes to waste. Airweb is the first step toward letting all of that quietly become useful, owned by the people who already paid for it.
A handful of hyperscalers
Three logos own most of the public internet. Capacity = a credit card, a console, and a single-vendor lock-in.
- Always-on fleets that idle most of the day
- Embodied carbon poured into new hardware
- One vendor, one bill, one outage radius
A federated, people-powered cloud
Capacity = whatever's plugged in around the world right now. Owned by the people who paid for it, traded peer-to-peer.
- Reuses devices that already exist
- Capacity scales with how many people show up
- No gatekeeper — anyone can host or rent
Open-source cloud provider
Hyperscaler-class capabilities don't have to live behind three logos and a credit-card form. Our long-term goal is an open, federated cloud where the "data center" is a coalition of homes, offices, and community spaces.
A real micro-server economy
Credits earned by contributing capacity buy capacity from others. Over time, that loop becomes a real economy — one where small operators, students, and hobbyists are first-class participants, not just customers.
Roadmap — the long road to a relay-less network
Airweb today still runs a central relay so the SSH front door has an address to point at. The whole point of the project is to shrink that center until it disappears. Here's the path — each phase moves more of the work off the relay and onto the network itself.
Self-hostable relay
Anyone can clone the repo and run their own Airweb. The protocol is just OpenSSH — no proprietary client, no managed dependency.
- One-file config, SQLite state
- Federated marketplace per host
- Built-in docs & forum subdomains
Multi-relay federation
Relays discover each other and exchange handle ownership, account ids, and credit balances. Your account works on any cooperating relay — not just the one you signed up with.
- Signed cross-relay handle registry
- Credit settlement between operators
- Pick any relay; the network knows you
Decentralized discovery
Replace the relay-owned directory with a DHT-style peer network. No single operator decides which handles, hosts, or listings exist — the network does, by consensus.
- Peer-to-peer handle & marketplace index
- Gossip-based reputation and uptime proofs
- Relays become equal peers, not gatekeepers
Relay-less tunnels
The relay itself becomes optional. Devices punch through NATs, negotiate routes over the peer network, and carry public traffic directly — no Airweb-operated server in the path. The "data center" is just the network.
- NAT traversal + peer routing for public ingress
- End-to-end encrypted, relay-optional fallback
- Fully owned, fully federated, fully decentralized
Greener by default
The most sustainable server is one that already exists. By giving a second life to devices that would otherwise sit idle — or worse, in a landfill — Airweb reduces the need to spin up new fleets of always-on hardware just to serve a few requests per minute.
FAQ
What kind of "spare device" actually works?
Anything that can run an ssh client and stay online: an old laptop, a desktop you barely use, a Raspberry Pi, a NAS, a mini-PC, even some routers. If it can hold an SSH session open, it can be an Airweb node.
Do I need to install anything?
No. Any standard ssh client works once you've downloaded airweb.fyi_. There is an optional Node CLI (client/airweb.js) that wraps ssh -R with friendlier flags if you want one.
How exactly am I charged?
You're metered by the bytes of public traffic that actually flow through your leased tunnels. Idle endpoints cost nothing. The dashboard shows live earnings and charges in both credits and an estimated USD value.
How do I sign in from another device?
Open /login and paste your private key. We never store private keys server-side — your aw_… account id is derived deterministically from the public key.
Is the traffic encrypted?
The leg between your device and Airweb is encrypted by SSH. The public leg uses whatever the front door speaks (HTTP on the bare port, HTTPS behind a TLS reverse proxy). For end-to-end TLS, terminate inside your local app and use a raw TCP tunnel.
Can I pick my own subdomain?
Yes — the SSH username you connect with becomes your subdomain (mysub@airweb.fyi → mysub.airweb.fyi). Spend credits in the dashboard to claim a permanent handle nobody else can take.
How do I stop a tunnel?
Press Ctrl+C in the SSH session or close the terminal. The tunnel disappears from the active list immediately and you stop accruing any charges.
● 2 tunnels currently active on this host — running on devices people already owned.