The archive · Health & Care · Product decision · 2024–2026
Workout.cool bets the open-source fitness app can outlive what killed workout.lol
After workout.lol died on video-licensing costs, its main contributor rebuilt it as MIT open source — Show HN 827 points, 8.4k stars.
Workout.cool (Snouzy)
What the business is
Workout.cool is a free, MIT-licensed, self-hostable fitness web app for building workout plans and tracking progress, backed by a 1,200+ exercise database with videos, attributes and translations (Next.js, PostgreSQL, Feature-Sliced Design).
How it started
Snouzy was the main contributor to workout.lol, an open-source workout-plan app that had real traction (1.4k GitHub stars, 95 forks, roughly 20K visits a month) before it was sold after video-licensing hurdles. The buyer stopped maintaining it and the repo went abandoned. For the next nine months he sent fifteen emails trying to save the project; he got no replies, feature requests and issues were ignored, and the community was left with a broken tool.
What happened
Rather than let the work disappear he built workout.cool from scratch with the same open-source spirit: MIT-licensed, self-hostable, 1,200+ exercises, progress tracking, translations and no license problems. The 2025-06-18 Show HN drew 827 points and 233 comments and reached #1 on the front page during the thread; the author spent it scaling under what he called the HN kiss of traffic, fixing an exercise-loading error and taking roadmap requests such as workout sharing with public links, difficulty levels and Strava or Garmin integrations. By the 2026-09-05 archive crawl the repo showed 8.4k stars, 746 forks and 468 commits, sponsors, a Discord and README translations in eight languages beyond English.
No ending yet — it is still running.
Background
Workout.cool is a free, MIT-licensed, self-hostable fitness coaching web app: build workout plans, track progress, and pick from a 1,200+ exercise database with videos, attributes and translations, on a Next.js/PostgreSQL stack. Its bet is that the workout app the community lost can survive without the cost structure that killed it — no exercise-video licensing deals, just embedded videos, donations and code anyone can run.
The backstory is a post-mortem of workout.lol. Snouzy was its main contributor; the project had 1.4k GitHub stars, 95 forks and about 20K visits a month before it was sold after video-licensing hurdles, after which the new owner stopped maintaining it. Over nine months he sent fifteen emails trying to save it, got no replies, watched feature requests and issues pile up ignored, and finally rebuilt the whole thing from scratch with the same open-source spirit but no license problems.
The 2025-06-18 Show HN drew 827 points and 233 comments and hit #1 on the Hacker News front page during the thread, with the author scaling through what he called the HN kiss of traffic and fixing an exercise-loading error live. By the 2026-09-05 archive crawl the repo showed 8.4k stars, 746 forks and 468 commits, sponsors, a Discord and translated READMEs — a live community project, not a company.
What has to be true
- He had the strongest possible wedge: as workout.lol's main contributor he carried the community, the exercise data and the credibility the revival needed.
- The rebuild removed the exact failure cause — paid exercise-video licensing — replacing it with embedded YouTube videos, self-hosting and donations.
- A personal, honest origin story (15 emails, no replies, not doing this for money) turned the launch into a community rescue rather than a product pitch.
- Open source made launch-day traffic productive: the #1 front-page crowd filed bugs and roadmap ideas that the author fixed and answered in the thread.
What can be applied
A product can die on its cost structure even with a loved community; the revival wins when the same asset is rebuilt around costs the community can carry.
Aftermath
As of 2026-09-05 Workout.cool is live open source with no company behind it: the repo shows 8.4k stars, 746 forks and 468 commits, README translations in eight languages, sponsors, a Discord and contribution guides. The original workout.lol repo still exists but is unmaintained, and no funding, pricing or revenue appears anywhere in the material — by design, since the author says he is not building for profit. The open question is whether a donation-funded, self-hosted fitness platform can sustain the maintenance and exercise-database updates the project promises.
Sources
- Show HN: Workout.cool – Open-source fitness coaching platform
- Snouzy/workout-cool — GitHub repository
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