Elowish
Private-by-default family gift-coordination app. shrug.host runs its application infrastructure.
What Elowish does
Elowish is a private-by-default app for coordinating gifts within a family. Parents keep a page for their kids; relatives claim gifts from a shared link — no duplicate presents, no group-text chaos, and no account required to give. It’s free for families, and it’s named for founder Tristan Cary’s daughter, Eloise.
What runs on shrug.host
We run Elowish’s application layer — the app itself and the environments and operations around it:
- The Next.js application, built with Bun and orchestrated with Coolify
- Dedicated Hetzner servers allocated to the Elowish team
- Production, development, and a live preview environment for every pull request
- TLS certificates for those environments
- Deploys, backups of what we operate, and uptime monitoring with alerting
Some parts of Elowish run on dedicated third-party services rather than here — the team is deliberately clear about that in their own writing on privacy. We operate the application infrastructure; we don’t claim to run the whole stack.
The relationship
Neil Hanlon operates shrug.host and is also on Elowish’s founding team, on infrastructure. That makes Elowish a related party, not an arm’s-length customer: the person who runs the servers is the same person building on them. When something breaks, he hears about it first.