Your app doesn’t need a database. Here’s what it needs instead.

I've been building web apps for a while, and they all end up looking the same. User does something → we update a database → we serve the latest state back. It works. It scales. Everyone does it this way. But it also means the database is the truth. And when the database is the truth, you have to trust whoever owns it — including yourself. I’ve had moments where that broke down. Not catastrophically — but enough to realise we had no way to prove what actually happened. State mutates. Logs drift. Backups lie. So I started exploring a different shape. The result is Concord — an app runtime where state is never stored. It's derived from a signed, portable history. Your data is just a file. You decide where it lives. The core idea Most apps store current state. Concord doesn't. Every action is appended to a history as an event. Current state is whatever you get when you replay those events from the beginning. There's nothing to mutate — just a log of what happened, and a runtime that recons