Drafft.ink – Infinite Canvas. Zero Subscription.

Designed for collaboration, not for venture capitalists.

What in the Actual Drafft is This?

DrafftInk is a high-performance, cross-platform, digital whiteboard with collaboration support I wish existed, but didn't. This isn't your flaky, laggy browser tab. This is a native application experience.

A whiteboard should be open source and fast, and never be contained by proprietary software. So, I wrote it in the language everyone loves to talk about, slapped a beautiful, native-feeling GUI on it with egui, and made it sing on every platform—desktop, web, whatever—using the magic of WebGPU.

The Origin Story (The Trauma)

Did you actually just ask that? Do you really need a why?

My week-long struggle with zero documentation and patchy TypeScript ended in a brutal realization: I was a peasant asking to use their private jet. They had zero intention of letting anyone actually self-host.

The natural question arose: "How hard could it actually be?". (Spoiler: Hard enough, but now it's done.)

Performance & Philosophy

Rust and WebGPU mean this thing is faster than your caffeine habit. The WebSocket backend is built for speed, not for vendor lock-in. Real-time, updates, it's like having your team in the same room, but without having to smell Kevin's tuna sandwich.

Key Features

• Cross-Platform Sanity: Works on Linux, Windows, macOS, and in your browser. No excuses.
• Real-Time Multi-User: Watch your team members draw their terrible ideas on the same canvas.
• Open Format: Export your masterpiece to PNG and JSON. Your data is yours. Forever.
• Source Code You Can Trust: It's all right here. No hidden telemetry, no third-party tracking, no corporate shenanigans.

Installation (You're an Adult, You've Got This)

I've made it almost as easy as installing an over-engineered Node app.

# This assumes you have Rust, Cargo, and necessary targets installed.
git clone https://github.com/drafft-ink/drafft-ink.git
cd drafft-ink

Native Desktop Version

# Compile and run the desktop application (Linux/macOS/Windows)
cargo run --release
# OR use the script
./build.sh --native

Web (WASM) Version

The WebGPU version is hosted, so you can just go to drafft.ink. To build and run it locally:

# Builds the WASM target and serves it locally for testing
./build.sh --wasm

The Open-Source Gospel

Seriously, this entire project is built on the philosophy that you should own your own tools and data.

I won't charge you for a sticky note. That's a promise. I'm not selling you a service; I'm giving you a tool.

The AI Code Disclosure (Let's Be Real)

Let's address the inevitable GitHub issue comment now:

• YES, some of this code was helped along by AI. Let's face it, once you treat AI as an uninformed over-confident intern, it works well (to some extent).
• NO, it's not all hallucinated boilerplate code.
• YES, I can write actual Rust code (and enjoy it). The core architecture and most initial draft of it have been typed out by human fingers.

Don't like it? The source is right here. Prove me wrong by submitting a human-written, better implementation! That's the beauty of open source.

License

AGPLv3 – This is my guarantee: no corporate lock-in, even as a web service.

Go forth and drafft!