About Garrul

1. Why Garrul exists

Garrul started with a specific irritation: a personal blog running Disqus, quietly serving ads and third-party trackers to readers who had come to read a blog post. Turning that off meant paying, and paying meant funding a system that still kept the comments on somebody else's servers.

The obvious alternatives all had the same shape of problem. The good self-hosted options — Commento, Isso, Remark42 — are genuinely good software, but every one of them wanted a server: a VPS to rent, a container to keep alive, a database to back up, security updates to apply. That's a real ongoing cost in money and attention for something that sits at the bottom of a blog post.

Cloudflare Workers changed the maths. A comment system is a small API and a small database; on Workers, D1, and KV that fits inside a free tier and needs no server to babysit. Garrul is what happens when you take that constraint seriously and build only for it.

2. Who builds it

One person, working under the handle KingPin. Not a company, not a team, not a startup with a runway. That is worth stating plainly because it should factor into your decision: there is no support contract behind Garrul, no on-call rotation, and no guarantee about what happens to it in five years.

What there is instead: the full source under Apache 2.0, a documented database schema, and a SQLite file you can export whenever you like. If the project stopped tomorrow, your comments would still be yours and your deployment would keep running.

If Garrul is useful to you, GitHub Sponsors and Ko-fi are how it stays funded. Neither is required for anything; there is no paid tier and no feature held back.

3. How it's built, and why on Cloudflare

Garrul is TypeScript on Cloudflare Workers, using Hono for routing. Comments live in D1, Cloudflare's SQLite database. Sessions and rate-limit counters live in KV, where short expiry times are free. Anti-spam uses Turnstile. The reader-facing widget is a single script that renders into a Shadow DOM, so it cannot inherit or break your site's CSS, and it's served from your own domain rather than a vendor's.

This is a real constraint, not a deployment preference. Garrul is not a Node application with a Cloudflare adapter bolted on — it's written against Workers primitives directly, and there is no Docker image or VPS install path. If you need comments on hardware you own outright, the projects named above remain the honest recommendation.

The upside of accepting the constraint is that the operational burden nearly disappears. There is no server to patch, no process to restart, and for a small or medium blog no bill: Cloudflare's free tier covers 100,000 Worker requests a day, 5 GB of D1 storage, and unlimited Turnstile challenges.

4. Release cadence and maturity

The first tag, v1.0.0, went out on 18 May 2026. As of 1 August 2026 the current release is v1.22.1 — the 37th tagged release, which works out to roughly one a week with no gaps. Every release is on the GitHub releases page with notes.

Be clear-eyed about what that does and doesn't tell you. It says the project is actively worked on and that fixes land quickly. It does not make Garrul old, battle-hardened, or widely deployed — it's a young project, and a young project maintained by one person carries the risks that implies. The demo comment section on the homepage runs the same code you would deploy, so you can judge the finished article before committing to it.

5. What Garrul is not

• Not a hosted service. There is no Garrul-operated SaaS storing other people's comments. You deploy it to your own Cloudflare account. The single exception is the demo widget on this site, which stores the comments left on it and is covered by our privacy policy.
• Not freemium. Apache 2.0, all features, no paid tier, no licence key, no seat count.
• Not a lock-in. D1 is SQLite. Dump the database to a file at any point. A Disqus XML importer ships in the box, so getting in is as easy as getting out.
• Not ad-supported. The embed carries no advertising, no analytics, and no third-party trackers, and Garrul HMAC-hashes IP addresses rather than storing them.

6. Getting in touch

Bugs and feature requests belong on the issue tracker, where the answer helps everyone who hits the same thing. For anything else — questions, privacy requests, or a note that something on this site is wrong — email [email protected].

Ready to try it? The install guide takes about twenty minutes.