VideoFloppy: Five Years, Ten Users, One Dollar

I built it because something I loved disappeared. Five years later it has a handful of users, one paying customer, and it taught me more than any tutorial. In 2017 I was preparing for IELTS, and somebody gave me the advice everyone gives: watch films with subtitles. That advice sent me looking for a specific kind of tool. Not a streaming service — a search engine for phrases. Type a sentence, and see it spoken, in context, in whatever film happened to contain it. I found one. An Estonian site, judging by the .ee domain, whose name I have completely forgotten. It did not host anything. It collected embedded players from video hosts elsewhere and made them searchable. That distinction mattered technically and it mattered legally, and at the time I did not think much about either — I just thought it was clever. Then it closed. No announcement, no explanation. I looked for an alternative for years and never found one. In 2021 I decided to build my own. The name I asked a friend, because naming things is not my strength. His logic was that the site is light. It stores nothing itself — no video files, no uploads, no gigabytes sitting on a disk. It holds pointers to things that live elsewhere, the way a floppy disk holds very little and is proud of it. VideoFloppy. It stuck. What it actually is A place to save, organise, and share videos that already exist on the internet. You bookmark a video from YouTube or another host, put it into an album, and share it or keep it. You can follow other users. The content today is mostly YouTube trailers, music videos, and whatever people have collected — my own albums are largely seventies and eighties disco, and an unreasonable amount of Modern Talking. Nothing is uploaded to my server. Every video plays from the host it already lives on, which means their CDN carries the bandwidth and my VPS stays cheap and idle. That was a deliberate architectural choice, and it is the single reason the project has survived five years without costin